Invisible blogging, or, be careful what you wish for

On the surface, this blog may seem quiet…even stagnant when compared to some of my fellow edubloggers. Indeed, I can see why people might think this is a dead blog when they check the timestamps posted here.

But if you were to dig further, and had admin access (!) you would see that there are many many posts in the pipeline, written in pieces but just not ready to be seen, lurking in the DRAFTS folder on this blog.

 

click on image above to take a closer lookIt is not as if Erin and I do not do any writing during the day…the problem is finding the energy and the time to finish the posts we start for this blog (and to comment on other people’s blogs as is required to keep the edublogosphere rolling) in between all of the other writing one has to do in any given work day in academia. I am sure many of you can relate, but for those of you who cannot, here is a glimpse into the life of this lowly edublogger:

Examples of writing I did in the last 7 days:

For work: some examples…creating accounts on Bb for special students taking language courses at my school (high school, faculty spouses, students whom the LDAP server still does not recognize…) and then sending lengthy emails explaining how to get where and when and why… finding public performance rights for foreign language videos that faculty want to show outside of class…writing as polite-as-I-can-be emails asking for better communication from others when the servers on campus are scheduled to go down for routine maintenance at a time when I might have a lab full of people trying to access those servers… trying to explain in words to my wonderful Chinese professor that she neither offended me nor have I abandoned her when she was moved to the newer version of Bb for testing purposes and therefore was movedu to the college’s educational tech support people and away from language-specific tech support (it is interesting how cultural dynamics sometimes need to be considered –and are often forgotten– in tech support situations)…. in sum…. much writing, but not a lot of blogging.

Oh but wait, there’s more…

For professional talks or conferences: completing conference/workshop proposals for The University of Victoria (Canada) in October 2006 (accepted), NERALLT at Harvard in October 2006 (accepted, but being tweeked), The NAIS Annual Conference with Barbara Ganley in March 2007 (accepted), ELI/EDUCAUSE again with Barbara Ganley in January 2007 (pending approval) .

And more still…for journals and publications: I am writing a chapter about using Skype in the Classroom for Terry Freedman’s updated “Coming of Age: An introduction to the NEW Worldwide Web” and then there is the IALLT Journal, which, with any luck and much less sleep on my and Erin’s part, will be an e-publication soon.

I mention these things not to say how grand I think I am or we are (I don’t and we don’t, trust me) but to say that 1) the educational world at large is suddenly quite keenly and intensely interested in what these tools can do for teaching and learning of languages, and I am grateful to others for inviting me/us to come and share experiences as well as to learn from theirs (I call this the “be careful what you wish for” phenomenon), 2) as people play with these tools there is a palpable need to pull people together and talk more … if I do nothing more than begin a conversation that others have been eager to start, hooray 3) more people need to step up to join in…trust me there is enough heavy lifting to go around! and 4) there are not enough hours in the day to get our own work done and also get the word out to others about the amazing possibilities social software tools now provide us. (no duh)

Thought bubble: we need a US Edubloggers meeting. Now.

Gentle readers, know that we are still here and still writing. And look! Today I even went beyond writing and got around to posting! We are still here and we are still in the thick of it, we just might be less visible than others for the moment.

Cheers!