I am putting Pedablogue on indefinite hiatus. Comments are closed, but I’ve left the archives up so that people can still read the many articles on educational theory and praxis.
I started this blog back in 2003 with the intention of sharing my research into the scholarship of teaching, and I think keeping a public journal really served me well. It expanded my knowledge of pedagogy, tied me in with the work of so many other educators out there, and helped me really develop my awareness of my own educational praxis, while also helping me to question the assumptions I harbored about teaching. I published several articles as a result of keeping this blog, and I continue to teach many of the principles I’ve learned in here (especially in a graduate-level course in “The Teaching of Writing and Popular Fiction” for our MFA program). But I have been lax in keeping this journal going, and reticent about renewing my work here for several reasons.
First, it has always been a little difficult for me to juggle my roles as professor and creative writer in a productive way, but when a new ball was tossed into my juggling routine — the administrative duties of being the Chairman of the Humanities Division at Seton Hill U — blogging became the lowest of my priorities. Where once I was blogging at least once per week, I now have been blogging every few months, and that’s just too sporadic and inconsequential for my tastes. That is not to say that my Scholarship of Teaching has fallen by the wayside — I continue to publish and write articles about teaching and I get to apply what I’ve learned in this journal in much of my work with faculty as Chair.
But beyond my own lack of time to commit to this project, I could point to the cultural shift from blogs to social networking, which sort of winnowed away my sense that I was writing for an active audience. But worse, the server on which this blog is based experienced a radical shift when the system moved from Moveable Type to WordPress and our system admin also changed. I can no longer edit the theme, which bothers me to no end, and as you’ll see in many of the posts line breaks and other errors found their way into hundreds of blog posts. This fractured my commitment to the site, and only added more administrative work to my plate…and I now find myself deleting comment spam from the site more often than I write for it.
So I’m taking an indefinite pause while I focus on other things. I may return to this page in the future, or I might turn it to some other purpose someday, but for now, this space is more of an archive of a learning journey I took from 2003-2011 than it is a living breathing document. Thank you to everyone who contributed and visited over the past eight years. You all taught me a lot, and I appreciate the many comments and ideas that were shared here. Pedablogue has been a successful edublogging experience and I still share many of the entries here with others. I hope readers will continue to draw inspiration from some of the articles, and explore the rich diversity that is available in contemporary scholarship of teaching.
This is not goodbye. Follow me on michaelarnzen.com to keep up with my other irons still burning in the fire.