My Blog Is Six Years Old

                                                             
                                                             Photo Credit: massdistraction via Compfight cc


My blog and I happen to share the same birthday. Although the day has officially finished, the early morning hours find me still at my computer. Until an hour ago Google was still displaying the Happy Birthday, Natasa doodle:

Awfully nice of Google if you ask me.

Traditionally on this day I look back at the year behind me and create a "sneeze post" where I list everything I wrote the year before. I didn't write that much last year, but I somehow managed to create 12 posts. Here they are:

As always, the beginning of the year is devoted to EVO sessions. Like this year, in 2013 I also attended five. In Time to Fess Up I tried to explain how I was planning to "juggle five balls" and why I thought this was a good way to learn. This blog was what kept it all together. It helped me see connections between courses. I am doing the same thing again and I am going to blog about my experience.

By providing the link to My Blog is Five Years Old I am trying to cheat you into reading last year's retrospective of my 2012 posts.

Week 2 - Declare, Where is (you guessed) about Week 2 of 2013 EVO sessions. In the meantime I had thrown into the mix a couple of very interesting MOOCs and I had made my mind where I wanted to participate actively and where I just wanted to sample.

In Tales of the Unexpected I had already started to synthetise my various learning experiences. One course that got most of my attention was E-learning and Digital Cultures. If you go to my post, you will be able to get a glimpse of what this course was like. I also shared this Prezi that was to serve as my mini portfolio:



On Metaphors, the Future and the Way We Are Wired is a fun post to read (even if I am saying so) because it contains a couple of digital stories I created that week, a great SF short video (from E-learning and Digital Cultures), Gardner Campbell's inspiring keynote and a Slideshare on edupunk that I found in the MultiMOOC wiki archives. I somehow mixed it all together.

What Makes Us Human is the last installment of my exciting five week learning journey. Again there are digital stories I created that week - several images and an Animoto SF story that I am very proud of.

Then interesting things started happening to me. In March I was sent to Slovenia as one of the two official representatives of ELTA Serbia. There I met two of my online friends face to face for the first time - Shelly Terrell and Sasa Sirk. Here's my account of the conference. I tried to go into as much detail as possible to give the people who were not present an idea about what it was like.

In May I presented on the Virtual Round Table Conference and also participated in a SEETA Webchat. I wrote about that here.

Seven Reasons Why Educators Should Blog is a post I wrote as homework for a writing MOOC I participated in. I worked very hard on this post to make it as presentable as possible and I did a lot of research. I also put my heart into it.

How I Became a Teacher is (of course) a story about how I became a teacher. It was an answer to a blogging challenge.

In October I presented at the Reform Symposium and I announced it here. Here's the link to my Reform Symposium profile.

Probably the most important post I wrote last year is this one. It announces the beginning of a blogging project that a couple of us started on SEETA. At the moment we have a small but active community of bloggers there and the seeds of an ebook that should, if all goes as planned, be of some help to new and wannabe bloggers.

As you can see, a lot of things have been happening outside this blog - the online conferences, various MOOCs, the seeds of my SEETA project. However, I believe that this blog, this six-year-old child of mine has made a lot of this possible. Not only did it hold everything together by helping me think and reflect, but it provided new opportunities and new connections.

Thank you, blog.