It must be getting on for seven years since I started blogging. It began as a way to share ideas I had come up with for teaching. I think the first was a slightly mad way of hacking a Wii controller and an LED to create an interactive whiteboard.
More recently I went through the process of writing a book, and then working for a think tank that was all about ‘big ideas’. I got a chance to write in a longer, more permanent form and to a much wider audience. A book has to be pretty carefully constructed to clearly get the ideas across and hopefully stand the test of time. My blog posts at Nesta did too. The organisation was very open in terms of what we blogged, but even in structureless systems there usually ends up being implicit structure people follow. The implicit structure there was big ideas carefully and robustly considered. It’s a pretty good yardstick for the blog of a think tank, all things considered, but it’s a particular mode that can make you pause too long before writing to be a prolific blogger.
I’m glad to have done those things, but they certainly got me into the mode of writing as a meticulous act of construction. In my new job I am, quite by choice, much closer to the action. I’m working with colleagues to communicate messages at events, to analyse and improve their work in teacher training and education programmes, and to better understand the fast moving world of digital making.
I started my newsletter a while back to start to write with a little more abandon. I’ve done that, nearly 40 issues of it now and long may it continue, but it’s mostly commenting on other people’s work and I want to share more of what I’m thinking.
I want to shift back to writing as a way of sharing my developing thinking. So I’m sat here on a park bench, tapping these characters into my iPhone and resolving to make a shift to blogging more regularly and more tentatively.
So I’m pressing post now just before it starts to rain, and I’ll be back soon with more thoughts as they occur to me.
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