StigmergicWeb

Time to rebrand.

I’ve been feeling a malaise in my desire to blog lately. I’ve attributed this to a number of things. With the M.Ed. complete, I’ve been spending more of my time with the family. I don’t want my children to think of me as the man who spends time in the untidy computer room downstairs. I’ve also had to chance to become involved in a few nifty projects - co-designing a course with Alec, reworking a website in a two week timeframe, developing an online course at school and developing my role as an in-school intructional technology support teacher. OK, this is more than a few projects but they all kind of inter-relate.

I think that Twitter is another reason my blogging productivity is low, for two reasons. First is that twitter is distracting enough to keep me from forming any coherent thoughts. When asked to describe twitter, one of my responses is that twitter is crack for anyone with ADD.

But I’ve finally hit on a bigger reason that the blogging productivity has declined. It’s time to move on. When I moved to this blog after spending time as an omegageek and as an ant, I chose the name of the blog from the concept of stigmergy

Stigmergy is a method of indirect communication in a self-organizing emergent system where its individual parts communicate with one another by modifying their local environment.

I wanted to talk about learning as an activity of a network, and that the community of educational-technology bloggers formed a kind of stigmergic network in the way we modified ideas by that whole rip-mix-learn-feed paradigm. A lot of bloggers have joined in on that conversation. They are far more articulate than I am so lately I’ve tended to follow the conversation and leave comments on other blogs rather than initiate some of the conversation here.

I still want to follow and occasionally be a part of those conversations but it is time to move on (cue the Sarah Brightman and Andrea Boccelli music). I’m not sure if the change will be changing what is here or heading to a new location. I think that I want to move in the direction of having a more general topic blog. I’ll still be talking about education, technology and digital learning. I’m still deeply interested in those topics and my career ensure that I will continue to have things to say about them. I also want to talk about parenting, politics, photography, insomnia as a lifestyle and anything else that I think is worth writing about. My life, like anyone else’s, has many facets to it and they are all related. I want to write about all parts of my life, not just one.

But no cat diaries - you have my word on that.

Stay tuned for details.

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