Tag Archives: writing

Blogging as an academic practice⤴

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Percolating ideas
Percolating ideas flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

I’ve been enjoying dipping in and out of the “On Writing” series that Jim Groom’s been hosting on Reclaim TV, although I’ve not been able to watch them live as they usually stream at 5pm on a Friday, by which time I am off line and off to the pub to meet friends. However, luckily they are also recorded, so I can catch up at my leisure, and this week I finally got around to watching the episode with Lee Skallerup Bessette, or ReadyWriting, as she’s known on ALL the socials.

Lee and Jim talk about many of the facets of Lee’s life – such as her growing up in Quebec but not being a francophone (watch the episode to hear why she asserts this), but – of course – it’s what Lee says about blogging that really resonates with me. Like Lee I’ve always been a voracious reader and a prolific writer, though I don’t write nearly as much as Lee, I don’t think. And, also like Lee, I do find it pretty easy nowadays. So when I heard Lee saying (at about 53 mins into the video) that her habit of blogging has helped her to be able to consistently push out a lot of decent quality words quickly, as long as the subject is one that’s familiar to her, I was nodding vigorously at the screen. And then she connects this type of writing to learning a musical instrument:

you don’t have to be great at it right but you just keep practicing it because it makes sense and it brings you joy and it helps you make sense of your life and it connects you to other people (at about 54:44 mins in)

Yes, absolutely yes. I’ve had a pretty shit week this week, for one reason and another, but I’ve still managed to churn out lots of words – because I can.  Well, when Lacey lets me!  Thanks Lee, and thanks Jim, for a great episode.

Academic Book Chapters⤴

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Every time I have an academic book chapter published I promise myself that I will never do it again, because it takes so long from first submitting an expression of interest to finally seeing it published. But then I forget, and see a call for chapters that interests me, and before I realise what I am doing I’ve committed myself to the process again.

But, on the other hand, there’s something really fulfilling about seeing the final publication and reading over what I wrote again  – not least because it’s been so long that I have actually forgotten what I wrote. So recently I was really pleased to find that I had chapters in two books published.

The first was a book about similarities and differences between disciplinary research and SoTL:

Honeychurch, S. (2025). SoTL and Disciplinary Research in Education Sciences: Collaboration, Bricolage and Remix. In: Bohndick, C., Kordts, R., Leschke, J., Vöing, N. (eds) Scholarship of Teaching and Learning und disziplinäre Forschung: Eine komplexe Beziehung. Doing Higher Education. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-47908-4_14

The second was, on the face of it, on the very different topic of Hope:

Honeychurch, S. (2025). 3. Serious fun: Reimagining Higher Education from a humane perspective. In S. Abegglen, T. Burns, R. F. Heller, R. Madhok, F. Neuhaus, J. Sandars, S. Sinfield, & U. Gitanjali Singh (Eds.), Stories of Hope (1st ed., pp. 41–48). Open Book Publishers. https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0462.03

As I read both chapters over I realised that both owe a lot to my remix communities in different ways. The title of the first explicitly talks about bricolage and remix, though the chapter itself discusses it in the context of an academic group who are not themselves bricoleurs. The second doesn’t mention remix in the title, but the chapter itself uses DS106 as an example of how to infuse HE with hope and fun.

When I talk to newer academics about starting out in publishing I advise them to find a golden thread – a theme that they see recurring in their work, or would like to develop. I guess it’s no surprise that I’ve found mine.

The seven stages of writing⤴

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Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart, and write.”

I used to agonise over how I wrote, because it seemed to be so disorganised, so messy, so … inefficient. And then, at some point in my thesis write up, I realised that there was no point in worrying about the things I could not change, as Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer advises. It was then that I started to realise that this was just how I wrote, and to make a virtue out of it. But one stage of my writing still troubled me and tripped me up. At some point in any writing project I undertake I would become convinced that I was not able, and never would be able, to finish it  – either because my writing was rubbish, or the topic was trite and boring, or because I was not authorised to write about it – the reason would vary, but it always happened. At this point sometimes I just gave up, but when it came to my thesis write up there was no way I was not going to submit it. I’ve written before about this writer’s block, and how I don’t find it easy to let go of my writing and publish it, but as time has passed I have realised that this despair that I feel is actually just one of the stages of my writing. And although that doesn’t stop the feelings from occurring, it is helping me to overcome it. So here are my seven stages of writing.

Excitement I have an idea …
Boredom But it’s taking too long …
Despair Ugh, this is hard!
Fear Maybe I just can’t do it?
Hope Oh, maybe if I look at it like this …?
Relief Actually, it’s not that bad!
Pride It’s done!

There’s still more to tease out about this whole process, of course – but this idea has been percolating for a long time now and it’s time to let go of it.

My blogging journey⤴

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word cloud with words from my thesis title

I started my blog on 17th July 2012, originally as a WordPress.com hosted site. I blogged sporadically about conferences I’d attended, bits of philosophy that interested me (at the time I was a tutor in Philosophy as well as a learning technologist) and other random thoughts. Looking back at it in order to write this post I can see that right from the beginning I was using this as a way to find my voice and sort out my thoughts.

On Feb 16th 2016 I moved my blog over to one of N’s servers with a .co.uk url, with his help, and I’ve had the same ‘self-hosted’* blog since then, still using WordPress – and still using the Twenty Ten theme because I like it.

* I say ‘self’ as it’s not me that does any of it – N sorts out all of the hosting for me.

In 2014 my love of Deleuze and Guattari* and their writings about rhizomes led me to sign up for a ‘course’ that Dave Cormier was hosting called Rhizomatic Learning – The community is the curriculum – or #rhizo14 as we called it (as that was the hashtag that we used for this event).

* The name of my blog, and my name across social media, comes from a concept from D&G.

Rhizo14 gave me a community to bounce ideas off, and with, and helped me to really kick start my blogging into a regular practice. During the event we had various different places across social media where we chatted – a Facebook group, a Twitter hashtag and a G+ group, but no one central place. My blog gave me somewhere that I could curate my conversations and know that I’d be able to find them again later. It was also good for writing long form posts that I could take my time over.

Through the people I met during rhizo14 and rhizo 15 (the second iteration of the event) I was introduced to another community called Connected Learning Massive(ly) Open Online Collaboration CLMOOC,  who at the time were running annual CPD summer courses which I participated in for the first time in June 2015. In 2016 I answered a call for volunteers to help run the 2016 run of the summer course and I became a part of the core facilitation team. These events ran with a combination of Google Drive, a WordPress blog and a newsletter, with a lot of conversation happening over G+ and Twitter. Participants were encouraged to use their personal blogs to curate their activities and share these with others, as I do on mine. Later I also decided to use this community as the basis for my PhD The emergence of participatory learning: authenticity, serendipity and creative playfulness.  My supervisor appreciated my use of blogging for reflective writing and encouraged me to use my blog as a way of talking about my research, and this helped me to make my research more participatory because I could write about my tentative findings and ask the community to validate them. This also made me think a LOT about the ethics of participatory and open research.

During the pandemic I found it pretty hard to keep publishing my own blog posts as well as supporting others at my institution, so I started posting my weekly #SilentSunday photos as a way of maintaining some sort of posting presence – I am currently up to number 126 of these. That meant that when I did have the head space to start writing blog posts again it didn’t feel like resurrecting a dead place.

I don’t usually get huge numbers of people reading my blog, though there are sometimes spikes, so recently I was a little surprised to get a notification telling me that my blog was getting a lot of hits. When I checked I found out that these were related to one recent blog post. I’d taken a  quick photo of some street art as I walked through Glasgow one day, and posted it with the title A Glasgow Banksy. It must have been posted on social media somewhere, because a few days after I had published it I started getting over 1,000 visits a day to that post for a few days. So that might be my five minutes of blogging fame.

Through the rhizos and CLMOOC, and particularly thanks to my friend Ron Leunissen, I was introduced to #DS106 and the Daily Create.  As it says on its web pages, The Daily Create is a “space for regular practice of spontaneous creativity”. Every day at 5am EST a new challenge (Today’s Daily Create – TDC) is posted on a WordPress blog thanks to the technical wizardry of Alan Levine. This might be a visual challenge asking you to share a photo you’ve taken or photo edit one that is shared. Maybe you’ll be asked to write a poem or a story, produce a video or make a gif. Often the prompt just asks you to respond in a creative way without stipulating a medium. And, even if the prompt does indicate a specific medium you don’t have to comply – it’s up to you what you do (or don’t) do. Some people complete the TDC every day, others dip in and out from time to time. There’s no prizes, and  no sanctions. The only rule is to MAKE ART, DAMMIT!

After lurking for a while I completed my first TDC  on March 16th 2016, and have done this every day since November 22nd 2017 – that’s 2702 consecutive days so far. In 2018 (I think?) I answered a call to help behind the scenes, and I’ve been doing that on and off since then (and a lot more on than off recently). It’s not as hard as it sounds – a few of us submit ideas for the daily create and we make sure that there’s always about a week’s worth in the queue – either new ones that have been submitted or reposts of earlier ones (with over 4800 already published there’s a lot of really good ideas to reuse and I really enjoy using the random search facility to find these). I also find that this triggers the creative part of my brain in another way – as I am going about my life on the internet I often get an idea for a TDC which I submit to the drafts folder to queue up later.

As well as my own blog, I also look after two for my Uni  and I run sessions to support colleagues who would like to try out blogging in an academic context. Our SoTL blog now has an editorial team to help us, but at the moment it’s just me looking after our Good Practice one. I try to encourage people to send me posts, and I wish I had more time to spend on it. That’s a project for future me.

As for my own blogging – I miss writing long form blog posts and I need to carve out some reflective time to do that. I do have a couple of posts that are bubbling away at the moment, and having this #blogging4life initiative has been fantastic for reminding me to get back to my own writing out loud. It’s nice to feel part of a community of bloggers.

My blogging journey⤴

from

word cloud with words from my thesis title

I started my blog on 17th July 2012, originally as a WordPress.com hosted site. I blogged sporadically about conferences I’d attended, bits of philosophy that interested me (at the time I was a tutor in Philosophy as well as a learning technologist) and other random thoughts. Looking back at it in order to write this post I can see that right from the beginning I was using this as a way to find my voice and sort out my thoughts.

On Feb 16th 2016 I moved my blog over to one of N’s servers with a .co.uk url, with his help, and I’ve had the same ‘self-hosted’* blog since then, still using WordPress – and still using the Twenty Ten theme because I like it.

* I say ‘self’ as it’s not me that does any of it – N sorts out all of the hosting for me.

In 2014 my love of Deleuze and Guattari* and their writings about rhizomes led me to sign up for a ‘course’ that Dave Cormier was hosting called Rhizomatic Learning – The community is the curriculum – or #rhizo14 as we called it (as that was the hashtag that we used for this event).

* The name of my blog, and my name across social media, comes from a concept from D&G.

Rhizo14 gave me a community to bounce ideas off, and with, and helped me to really kick start my blogging into a regular practice. During the event we had various different places across social media where we chatted – a Facebook group, a Twitter hashtag and a G+ group, but no one central place. My blog gave me somewhere that I could curate my conversations and know that I’d be able to find them again later. It was also good for writing long form posts that I could take my time over.

Through the people I met during rhizo14 and rhizo 15 (the second iteration of the event) I was introduced to another community called Connected Learning Massive(ly) Open Online Collaboration CLMOOC,  who at the time were running annual CPD summer courses which I participated in for the first time in June 2015. In 2016 I answered a call for volunteers to help run the 2016 run of the summer course and I became a part of the core facilitation team. These events ran with a combination of Google Drive, a WordPress blog and a newsletter, with a lot of conversation happening over G+ and Twitter. Participants were encouraged to use their personal blogs to curate their activities and share these with others, as I do on mine. Later I also decided to use this community as the basis for my PhD The emergence of participatory learning: authenticity, serendipity and creative playfulness.  My supervisor appreciated my use of blogging for reflective writing and encouraged me to use my blog as a way of talking about my research, and this helped me to make my research more participatory because I could write about my tentative findings and ask the community to validate them. This also made me think a LOT about the ethics of participatory and open research.

During the pandemic I found it pretty hard to keep publishing my own blog posts as well as supporting others at my institution, so I started posting my weekly #SilentSunday photos as a way of maintaining some sort of posting presence – I am currently up to number 126 of these. That meant that when I did have the head space to start writing blog posts again it didn’t feel like resurrecting a dead place.

I don’t usually get huge numbers of people reading my blog, though there are sometimes spikes, so recently I was a little surprised to get a notification telling me that my blog was getting a lot of hits. When I checked I found out that these were related to one recent blog post. I’d taken a  quick photo of some street art as I walked through Glasgow one day, and posted it with the title A Glasgow Banksy. It must have been posted on social media somewhere, because a few days after I had published it I started getting over 1,000 visits a day to that post for a few days. So that might be my five minutes of blogging fame.

Through the rhizos and CLMOOC, and particularly thanks to my friend Ron Leunissen, I was introduced to #DS106 and the Daily Create.  As it says on its web pages, The Daily Create is a “space for regular practice of spontaneous creativity”. Every day at 5am EST a new challenge (Today’s Daily Create – TDC) is posted on a WordPress blog thanks to the technical wizardry of Alan Levine. This might be a visual challenge asking you to share a photo you’ve taken or photo edit one that is shared. Maybe you’ll be asked to write a poem or a story, produce a video or make a gif. Often the prompt just asks you to respond in a creative way without stipulating a medium. And, even if the prompt does indicate a specific medium you don’t have to comply – it’s up to you what you do (or don’t) do. Some people complete the TDC every day, others dip in and out from time to time. There’s no prizes, and  no sanctions. The only rule is to MAKE ART, DAMMIT!

After lurking for a while I completed my first TDC  on March 16th 2016, and have done this every day since November 22nd 2017 – that’s 2702 consecutive days so far. In 2018 (I think?) I answered a call to help behind the scenes, and I’ve been doing that on and off since then (and a lot more on than off recently). It’s not as hard as it sounds – a few of us submit ideas for the daily create and we make sure that there’s always about a week’s worth in the queue – either new ones that have been submitted or reposts of earlier ones (with over 4800 already published there’s a lot of really good ideas to reuse and I really enjoy using the random search facility to find these). I also find that this triggers the creative part of my brain in another way – as I am going about my life on the internet I often get an idea for a TDC which I submit to the drafts folder to queue up later.

As well as my own blog, I also look after two for my Uni  and I run sessions to support colleagues who would like to try out blogging in an academic context. Our SoTL blog now has an editorial team to help us, but at the moment it’s just me looking after our Good Practice one. I try to encourage people to send me posts, and I wish I had more time to spend on it. That’s a project for future me.

As for my own blogging – I miss writing long form blog posts and I need to carve out some reflective time to do that. I do have a couple of posts that are bubbling away at the moment, and having this #blogging4life initiative has been fantastic for reminding me to get back to my own writing out loud. It’s nice to feel part of a community of bloggers.

Blogging Questions Challenge⤴

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Nobody’s asked me, but that’s never stopped me from having an opinion, so here goes.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

I feel that I should say something deep or profound, but actually I can’t remember. I really started blogging regularly during #rhizo14 though, as that gave me a community to blog with and motivation to blog. So blame Dave.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why do you use it?

WordPress. I know how to use it and I don’t know of anything better.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

No, this is my first and only personal blog (though I am self-hosted thanks to Niall). All the institutional blogs I admin and have used are or have been WordPress. I did use Wikispaces a lot at one time though. I always much preferred wikis to blogs.

How do you write your posts?

It depends. Short posts are bashed out straight into the editing interface. I choose my Silent Sunday post every Saturday afternoon, and enjoy sifting through my week’s photos to find one to capture the spirit of that week. Longer posts are usually composed longhand, in dribs and drabs, with a fountain pen (I have many!) and lovely shimmery ink. I sometimes scrawl ideas on post-it notes and in the margins of other things I am writing. Sometimes I am in a meeting, watching TV, or reading a book when I get an idea I need to jot down to write around later. On sunny weekend afternoons I will pack a bag of pens and paper and sit in the back garden doodling and drafting something. And then, once I’ve written them, there’s the question of whether I should bother publishing them at all.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

Whenever I have the space to think. Sunny days (see above), boring Zoom meetings when I can get away with turning off my camera, when I am working with inspiring and interesting people who wake up my creative processes. Just before tea on a day Niall is cooking it. Whenever I am allowed to type or write (having two cats can be a barrier to these!). When I am on a long train journey or waiting for a plane. When I am amused, inspired or annoyed. When I want to know what I think. When I want to understand. When I am part of a community who are talking and blogging. After rhizo14/15, it was the CLMooc collaborative that inspired me, and of course the Daily Create/DS106 people. When I am walking, cleaning or knitting.

Do you normally publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit?

I usually press publish as soon as it’s all in WordPress, then immediately spot typos and edit it. But it might be months simmering in my head and scrawled on bits of paper before it gets into a form that I can type up (see how I write, above and my post about being good enough).

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

I like my post about ticky-tacky feedback quite a lot, partly because I enjoy writing about things that give me ear worms and Little Boxes is a great track (and oh my, I love that uke!). I also enjoyed writing the one about Cargo Cults – I learnt a lot as I wrote that. I also learnt loads by writing my post about vicarious learning.

Any future plans for the blog?

Just to keep on blogging, and to return to more written posts. Heck, I miss writing long posts. And to add a blog roll. I am sure I had one once, but it’s not there now.

Who will participate next?

I waited a while to write this post because my husband, Niall Barr, was moving his blog to a new home. So over to him. I’d also love to see my CLMOOC pal Sheri join us.

Because Niall asked: I’ve been tracing this challenge back, and as far as I can see it starts here: https://blog.avas.space/bear-blog-challenge/

Easy Writing⤴

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Nearly there


Nearly there flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

People often tell me that they wished they found it as easy to write as I do – because, they think, it’s obvious that writing comes naturally to me. And, actually, they’re right – I do find writing easy. Whether I’m typing at a computer or (more often) writing with one of my many fountain pens, I don’t have a problem getting words onto paper.

What is much more difficult is letting go of those words. Often, once I’ve written a blog post I don’t think it’s worth publishing – because I write in order to understand what I am thinking, and once I know I don’t need it any more, and I don’t think anyone else will find it interesting. Other times the words I have written don’t feel like the right words to publish – probably because I was ranting to myself as I was writing (which is good, as it helps me to write the frustration and anger out of my head).

So, yeah – writing’s easy. But writing the right words – that’s harder.

The KISS approach to blogging⤴

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Tiny clanger

Tiny clanger flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

Reading Jim’s recent blog post earlier got me thinking. I half typed a comment, but then Teams started lighting up with notifications and before I knew it I was engrossed in the day job. Anyway, I digress.

While I admire those who can write long, complicated blog posts, as Maren says, and Taylor notes, it’s fine to post short blog posts. So to add to the slogans for our bloggers anonymous self-help group, I’m suggesting the KISS approach to blogging. Readers will no doubt be familiar with the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid – or Keep It Simple Stupid) and this approach riffs off that. I suggest that when starting out blogging, or trying to kick start your practice, you use the KISS approach. What does this stand for? Well, when I first had the idea, this slogan came to mind:

Keep It Small, Stupid

But, of course, there can be variants. Maybe you’d like to think of it as:

Keep it Stupid Small

or maybe you prefer:

Keep It Small (and) Simple

Whatever. But just remember, small is beautiful.

Nomad Blogging Machine⤴

from

Well, it’s official – I’ve got the badge.

Blogging badge

Now I’d better keep on blogging. Inspired by Alan’s plugin I started to think of quotes about writing that I could use to explain why I blog and my thoughts turned, as ever, to Laurel Richardson.

“I [blog] because I want to find something out. I [blog] in order to learn something that I did not know before I [blogged] it. I was taught, however, as perhaps you were, too, not to [blog] until I knew what I wanted to say, until my points were organized and outlined.” (Richardson, 2000, p. 924)

And then I remembered a passage from Virginia Woolf – how perfect is this?

“So long as you [blog] what you wish to [blog], that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”
Virginia Woolf, A [Blog] of One’s Own.

To be continued …

Richardson, L. (2000). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 923–948). Sage.

Woolf, Virginia (1935). A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth Press p 159

Reflection on an ongoing collaboration⤴

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OEGlobal Postcard

“Postcards on Pedagogy” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

It’s a couple of weeks into the UW/UofG collaboration, and I thought I’d take a few minutes to reflect on my experiences so far.

It started out very low-key for me. Mum died on 10th October 2024 (I still can’t type that without having to pause to wipe my eyes). So when the collaboration ‘officially’ began at the beginning of November, I knew that my participation would be interrupted by my need to travel 470 miles south to attend her funeral in early November, and all of the emotional upheaval that would entail. But I thoroughly enjoyed meeting my group (Debs, Alka and Mary) over Zoom and coming up with an asynchronous activity for us all to add to before meeting again on the 18th. On my return from England, after pushing through the mountain of work that had accumulated in my absence, I enjoyed a brief hiatus that I allowed myself in which write. Sending a quick email to Debs, Alka and Mary on Tuesday evening (my time) resulted in three lovely replies in my inbox on Wed morning – that really gave me a boost, and I have found a little more time to plan my next contribution to the collaboration.

I also found time to catch up with a project initiated by Carole, who is sending out prompts asking people to respond with a digital postcard. Carole had sent a card around to the group with a picture of her typical classroom. I have had neither classrooms nor students for years now, so I responded with a postcard remix from the amazing Bryan Mather’s remixer. However, this did get me thinking about my own learning environment, and an idea for my next remix.

Both of these activities have helped me to reflect on what I was hoping to gain from this collaboration, and what I was enjoying. I think that one thing that I have realised from my online communities is to enter experiences like this without rigid expectations, but with high hopes. I hoped to meet good people, to have interesting conversations, to participate in ways that I had not anticipated, and without rigid rules (no facilitators telling me that I am doing it wrong).  And I always hope for the opportunity to play with remix.

Well, so far I’ve not been disappointed, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the month.