So, that is 54 diary entries here, which means I have worked on this project for 54 days this summer. Prior to the summer, I just did not have a lot of time for this; when school is in session, I can really only tinker with things because I don't have any stretches of time for really sustained bursts of work. But I did conceive the whole thing so that my plan was 100% in place when summer started, and that preliminary planning is documented at the blog too:
March 21. My Million-Dollar Content Development Process
March 18. Reading Diary Blogs... and the End of Myth-Folklore Quizzes
March 2. Content Development: Time for a New Myth-Folklore "Website"
Of course during March and April I was writing a lot of posts about the course redesign at Google+, thinking through the process in writing, and much of my blog this summer has consisted of nothing more than embedded G+ blog posts or links to G+ posts. But that's actually turned out to be a good thing. I love G+ as a place to interact during the day but it is useless - USELESS - as an archive of past events, which is my one real gripe against it. If we had a dashboard like Blogger, with search (although the search in the Blogger dashboard is really deficient, alas) and with labels, then G+ could be a great space not just in the immediate present but also as an archive of past thoughts and content.
Well, be that as it may, my solution of embedding/linking to G+ posts here in the blog has proved to be a great solution for this summer. It has meant I could share spontaneously during the day at G+ and have some conversations there also, while at the same time documenting what I did here.
I'm not sure I would ever actually consult the blog posts here; the process has been very very very steady from day to day, which is no doubt why it has gone so well. But at the same time, I know I benefited just from the discipline of writing something here every day.
Plus, this blog is something I might share with others. For example, I will definitely share it with my students this fall, both as a "what I did on my summer vacation" kind of thing, but also as an example of using Blogger as a project management tool.
And I'll also share it with anybody at my school who is interested since it seems to me a great idea to document both course design work and course redesign work in order to share ideas. Now, just how I will manage to share this with anybody at my school is a mystery, since my school is so not about sharing things like this - no blogs, no discussions online, nothing. But at the end of summer, I will be sending out some emails to people who might be interested in what I've done, so I'll be able to share not just the link to the finished UN-Textbook itself, but also to this blog.
Three cheers for blogging!
