A #25YearsOfEdTech blog post about blogging

If you want to do a true deep dive immersion into a book, produce the audio version of it.

I have loved producing the audio version of 25 Years of Ed Tech. As I edit the submissions from all the narrators and hear the chapters many times over through the course of editing them, I am conscious that this is exactly the opposite of the type of reading I do on a day to day basis, which tends to focus on quantity over quality. Scan and move on.

This project has given me an excuse to slow down and really pay attention to the details and to what it is each of the readers chooses to emphasize through their reading of the book.

But the piece of this project I am most enjoying is the one that I have had very little to do with, and that is Laura Pasquini’s companion podcast Between the Chapters. Laura has been brilliant at pulling this podcast together. Finding great guests and guiding the conversations in a kind of book club discussion of each week’s chapter.

This week, I had the chance to be a guest on Between the Chapters to talk about Chapter 10: 2003 Blogs with Bonnie Stewart.

I actually asked Laura if I could be part of this convo because, when she said that Bonnie would be her guest, I wanted the opportunity to connect with Bonnie as our roots in blogging are very similar. Before we blogged about education or digital identity, we both were blogging about being parents. That is where I first got to know Bonnie, virtually, and I thought this would be a way to talk about why blogging was so important in those early days around 2003-2006.

The pre-Facebook & Twitter days.

A time when blogs were the place where you connected with others and built relationships. Digital but often strengthened through IRL events and connections like conferences. The essence of those early days of blogging (even though I maybe didn’t realize it quite as much at the time as I do today) was about using the web to develop relationships. This was pretty profound for some of us who were moving from a place where the web was a place we went to in order to find information. The web was now a place we used to build relationships, and blogs played a crucial role in that.

Here is this week’s episode.