A Sense of Doubt blog post #2037 - Why blog? Use your blog to enhance instruction, education, and your profession

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2037 - Why blog? Blog Matters - Blogging Presentation for LCC In-Service

Welcome to my presentation about BLOGGING and it use in education.

As described here:

I will probably tell the longer version stories of my blog work later in this presentation; however, to start it's important to know, three bloggy things:

1. SENSE OF DOUBT: This is my main blog. As of this writing, I am on post #2037. Though I started the blog in 2007, my posts were very intermittent until I started making daily posts on July 6th, 2015.

2. 365 T-SHIRTS: Prior to taking up a daily broadcast schedule on SENSE OF DOUBT. I posted daily about t-shirts from March 22, 2013 through March 21, 2014: that's 365 days.

3. RANDITION SWOOM: My failed attempt to be a "content provider" and monetize my blog with Google Adsense.

WHAT'S A BLOG?

The word "blog" comes from the original "web log" as in an online journal.

The main platforms for blogging today are Google's Blogger and Word Press.

I am not going to talk much about Word Press, though it's a great platform to use. The main benefit to Word Press is being able to host it on one's own site, which has been a goal of mine for a few years (both my own site and migrating from Blogger to my own Word Press instance).



This presentation contains three parts:

Part One: Why blog? How will it enhance your career goals as an instructor?

Part Two: What the blog looks like: tons of examples

Part Three: How to create a blog with Blogger part of Google's Product Suite




WHY BLOG?

- Blogging demonstrates a commitment to lifelong learning.

- Blogging is publishing and thus a professional development activity.

- Blogging can be used to enhance and support instruction in many ways in all disciplines.

- And blogging is just FUN and as my students will tell you, I am always trying out the FUN in the key of FUNK (the FUN in FUNKY).

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #554 - Never Stop Learning

- Blogging demonstrates a commitment to lifelong learning.

We are committed to teaching our students to be independent, empowered lifelong learners.

Isn't it incumbent upon us to model that commitment in our own lives?

There are many ways to show students what lifelong learning looks like, but one way is maintaining a publication presence that demonstrates our own self-education, Blogging is a great way to publically display our learning.

I frequently explain on my blog that it is not my teaching but my study (though sometimes IT IS my TEACHING very directly).

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1578 - Not my Teaching But My Study

Not My Teaching, But My Study

What I write here is not my teaching, but my study; it is not a lesson for others, but for me. And yet it should not be held against me if I publish what I write. What is useful to me may also by accident be useful to another. Moreover, I am not spoiling anything, I am only using what is mine. And if I play the fool, it is at my expense and without harm to anyone. For it is a folly that will die with me, and will have no consequences.

Montaigne

also:

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1110 - Not my teaching but my study - Hey Mom Reprint



As such, my blog is all about the things I am interested in. I group my subject matter into categories.

FREQUENCY

One of the most abundant categories is comic books (285), but there's others that are over 100, such as computers (153); Warren Ellis, from whom I cribbed the "not my teaching but my study" line (106), science fiction (160), women in music (129), science (118), politics (140), David Bowie (114),
and even school (195).

Skewing these numbers is the fact that they include the unpublished as well as the published blog posts but it is a very fair depiction of my main interest categories.

Though I do care about LBGTQ issues, Antisemetism, and opposing violence, there's other factors operating in why I posted 114 times about David Bowie and only 21 times about LGTQ issues through my current 2037 SENSE OF DOUBT posts. If I started a daily LBGTQ post as I did a Daily Bowie post after the British artists died in 2016, I would probably have over 100 posts about homophobia, trans rights, and gay pride.

SHOW THE LEARNING

What is true is that when I want to learn something or have learned something, I make a blog posts for it.

Case in point, this blog post.



But also demonstrated in so many of the 2000+ posts not just on this blog but the 365 on the t-shirts blog. I love learning. I am always learning, and I like to share what I am learning.



Or when studying MATHS (as the Brits say), I had a COOL study room with a separate monitor in SANGREN HALL at WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY, and I would camp out and study (and hold teacher office hours for any students who needed to chat). Often my posts were short -- because, studying! -- but I would insert things to remember, such as derivative rules and the unit circle.

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #633 - Studying Calculus - Exam #2

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #141 - PreCalculus Test Today




LEARN IT; POST IT - an example

I remember coming home from work one day, and my wife had been watching some great TED talks. She insisted that I sit down and watch videos by Jill Bolte Taylor and Susan Cain. I did, and they became part of this post:

T-shirt #161 - "Blue, Blue, Electric Blue, that's the Color of my room, where I will live..."

I have lost count of the number of times I have recommended those videos to friends, family, colleagues, and most of all students. Sure I could just share links, but my blog post features a quick one link way to share, a page that contains additional content, and the possibility that the person will continue to explore my blog after consuming the content on that page.

This BLUE BLUE post is just one example of many. If you're learning, the content will come.





- Blogging is publishing and thus a professional development activity.

At various schools, for which I had to log so many professional development activities per year, I always listed my blog as it is considered publishing and a daily blog is too much of a commitment not to list in professional things I am doing.

I AM A WRITER WHO WRITES

I am a writer. I was a paid and published writer long before I was a teacher, as I wrote a column on magic performance and magicians for the local paper -- The Richland Journal -- from 1978-1980 and published in various magazines devoted to magic and magicians (you know, like Houdini and not like Aleister Crowley).

Thus, blogging came naturally to my wheelhouse because by the time I started I had worked in journalism since 1994 writing news, features, and arts reviews as well as a column on comic books from 1995-1997. I also wrote for research book companies, trade magazines, and assorted other book publishers.

As a writer and a teacher of writing, it was important to me to be a teacher of writing who is also an active writer who writes and publishes not just someone who claims to be a writer and never or rarely publishes.

RE-PUBLISH

At one point in my blogging regimen, always on the lookout for more posts on a daily schedule, I started re-publishing some of this content from my days as a journalist, though I still have so much more content that I have not shared.

Furthermore, if my blog supports my teaching, demonstrates my lifelong learning, and shows off some original writing, then I feel strongly that it counts as a professional development activity.

Granted the content on my blog is not ALWAYS original because I do a lot of sharing. I must do sharing if I intend to keep up a daily schedule and some dedication to substantial content every day.

Also, granted, some people are not teaching writing, but most disciplines consider writing and publishing as a professional activity that everyone must do. People from all disciplines can use a blog to enhance their professional development.

Lastly, WRITING SAMPLES.

As I apply for jobs, I have used the blog to collect writing samples to share with prospective employers and have plans to (someday) do some other kinds of writing (like technical writing) to show what I can do.

For instance, I created a WRITING SAMPLES category (linked there), which contains five samples of writing that shows a variety of my skills, starting with a writing self-inventory.



- Blogging can be used to enhance and support instruction in many ways in all disciplines.

I am going to give a full tour of this idea in my WHAT TO BLOG part when I show tons of examples.

In short, a few ideas here.

As stated before, I wanted the blog to be a work of a writer writing as much as possible. One thing I tried to do early on was reviews of things, mainly things I was reading, such as books like

The Ten Cent Plague book review


FROM THAT POST: 

Between 1954 and 1956, more than half of the comic books on the newsstand had disappeared (Hadju, pg. 326). The number of titles dropped from 650 to 250. By the end of 1955, EC discontinued all its comic books, keeping only Mad, which became Mad Magazine, since magazines were not subjected to the same regulations as comic books by the CMAA. Five other publishers went out of business completely: Star, Sterling, Toby Press, United Features Syndicate, and Eastern Color.

"Everybody was punished," said Carmine Infantino (who died last year as I featured in my T-shirt blog in shirt #20 devoted to the Flash). "It was like the plague. The work dried up, and you had nowhere to go because comic were a dirty word, You couldn't say you were a comics artist, and you had nothing to put in your portfolio. If you said you drew comic books, it was like saying you were a child molester. It was a nightmare, especially for a lot of people who got into comic in the first place because, you know, that was where we could go" (as quoted in Hadju, pg. 326).

And yet, Mad Magazine survived the tumult and even thrived as the few comics that remained held their ground awaiting the resurgence that would start in 1961 with The Fantastic Four. Robert Crumb expressed the power of Mad well: "it was really the coming together of everything that was great in EC and some of the other comics before the Code... Here was a publication making fun of highly respected American institutions in the square, military, post-World War II environment and doing so in a crude, weird way... It countered all the stifling, goody-two-shoes fifties-propaganda totalitarian vision that was put forth in the media, the schools, and everything. A big part of its appeal to me is that it was so strange and esoteric and outside of this mainstream" (as quoted in Hadju pg.333).

or comic books, which arrive at the store weekly, reviewed each week:

Weekly Comics for 1404.16

FROM THAT POST:

MARVEL ANNOUNCES NEW MS. MARVEL SERIES

First up is the new "Ms. Marvel." The Marvel Comics Company must renew trademarks, and with the previous Ms. Marvel (who has been known by many names) taking the mantle of Captain Marvel (a smart move given her history), it's time for a new Ms. Marvel. Nerd magnet Stephen Colbert satirized a reaction in a link farther below, shared by Charles Skaggs.

FROM WORD OF THE NERD ONLINE (see link):

Ms. Marvel will center on 16-year-old Kamala Khan, a Muslim-American teenager living in Jersey City, New Jersey. Like any teenager, all of her opportunities are in front her and she is full of potential, but her parents’ high expectations come with tons of pressure and has led Kamala to carve out a future that she has little interest in.

“At her core, Kamala is just a 16-year-old girl, exploring the many facets of her identity when she is suddenly bestowed with super-human powers that send her on the adventure of a lifetime,” says Marvel Comics Editor In Chief Axel Alonso.

The series, and its central character, are brought to life by an all-star creative team, led by acclaimed novelist and multi-Eisner nominee, G. Willow Wilson (Air, Mystic, Alif The Unseen). Her writings about modern religion have appeared in such outlets as New York Times’ Magazine and The Atlantic. Critically-acclaimed artist Adrian Alphona (Runaways, Uncanny X-Force) brings his vivid artistry to the project capturing the vibrantly rich and kinetic world in which Kamala lives.


DAILY IS TOUGH ON ORIGINALITY

It's not possible to maintain a high-output of original content on a daily basis. In fact, I read too much to even keep up on book reviews let alone comic books. Though I do keep my GOOD READS updated.

DIRECTLY ENHANCE INSTRUCTION

Over the last five years of doing SENSE OF DOUBT daily, I have decided to directly enhance my instruction by composing assignments, lessons, and supplemental material right on the blog and sending students to my blog to view the material. As I stated before this has the added benefit of encouraging them to look around and explore if they are interested. If not, then not.

For years, I made my blog a thing outside of my teaching jobs. I talked about it a lot, described new posts to students, and encouraged them to go check out my posts, including links in emails and announcements, but I never REQUIRED them to look at the blog.

However, in the last couple of years, as I have used the blog more and more to share essential content, I have more or less required them to look at it.

Obviously, the teaching of writing is best supported by creating written things for students to view.

Of course, my posts are about WRITING and the teaching of writing, such as a series on writing persuasive essays, the cornerstone of composition classes, culminating in a post collecting past posts and my new video series (urging students to also subscribe to my  YOU TUBE channel):

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1948 - The Tower Persuasive Essay Writing Video Series - part eleven


Or just a good post on grammar and writing sentences:

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1789 - The IT Phenomenon and good sentence rules







However, I have also shared computer science and math content on my blog, which is much the same as what teachers of those disciplines could share. More examples in my examples section, but here's one. For instance, when learning things about math, short math puzzlers and lessons are great ways to enhance study of math and/or science.

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1597 - MATH: If x-x = x/x, then what is x?

In addition to directly supporting instruction, all the additional information and learning support the direct instruction well much like my past recommendations to students, such as "hey I just created this cool post on Gödel and Time and the Modern Mind, with some original content and a great deal of sharing. Check it out."

I use my blog to collect videos or host cool videos that I want to share with students, such as MATH:

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #604 - Calculus Video Resources part one




Or my own chosen discipline, writing, specifically the DREAD Pirate Roberts.... um, I mean,

RESEARCH PROJECT for ENGLISH 102:


A Sense of Doubt blog post #1816 - Writing a Research Paper - Marble Jar and MLA citation



Sometimes, with the first link, I share A WHOLE BUNCH OF VIDEOS in a single blog post, or, as in the second link directly above, I share just one video (actually three but fewer than the Calculus one).

I vet the videos and often curate contents, directing students to the best and interspersing other lessons and comments.

As you can see, you can INSERT the videos in the blog page itself for direct access, which is what I have done with the videos I have created as a way to collect and manage them outside of YOU TUBE or CANVAS.

AND PSYCHOLOGY

And as for even more disciplines, as I teach some psychology in my English classes, here's one example:

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1479 - Jungian Personality Types and Enneagrams and thinking about self and personhood

and so much more...

More examples to come.





.... and HISTORY

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1469 - Imperialism, the myth of "RACE," and GENOCIDE

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1324 - No More Glorifying Genocide, Cruelty, and Avarice - NO MORE COLUMBUS DAY



AND MAKE STUDENTS BLOG AND RECEIVE DELIVERABLES!

I am adding this note after the presentation before re-publication for 2009.15 at 10:10 a.m. Pacific.

Proving my point about narcissism, I neglected to add how I have used blogs as assignments for student's to share their work with me, each other, and the whole world via the Internet.

Students start to think more about audience and how their writing will be perceived once it could be read by literally anyone, even people far away they do not know, have not met, and likely never will.

This reality sunk in with me early in my years as a journalist when, in a restaurant, I saw someone reading something I had written in the newspaper. Suddenly, I was interested in checking the circulation numbers versus the number of actual readers within that circulation versus those who might actually read what I read, or even part of it, and that last number was still in the thousands.

My blog views are not so high. I joke that I have two readers, one of whom is my wife's aunt, whom I have never met, but who loves everything I do. The other should be someone closer to me, like my dad, my sister, my wife, my best friend, but none of these people have time to read my daily meanderings. I feel blessed and honored when anyone reads anything I post at all let alone comments on it (PLEASE LEAVE ME A COMMENT!!). My all time page views in thirteen years of writing this blog and five years of writing daily are just at 203, 139, and many of those are web-scraping bots from Russia and China. Last month, I had 2343 page views. My high for the month so far is 253 views on September 8th. The WEEKLY HODGE PODGE scores the best each week with 79 views so far since Saturday.

Even so, I do think about audience and mention you readers when I am not writing directly to my Mom in HEY MOM. I found that my students thought about their readers as well in new and different ways than work that never leaves the class room.

Most often, I have used blogs to have students post self introductions of themselves to me and classmates, like these:

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1663 - Students and Introductions Fall 2018

Iman Ayad - Concordia University student - Fall 2018

In many semesters/quarters, I  have had students use the blog that they set up to share several other assignments, ongoing journals about their research project and related studies, and reading journals for Humanities or literature classes.

As some faculty colleagues brainstormed in the presentation session, the blog would be ideal for an ongoing semester long project in which a journal is a good fit or final presentation, the results of which, once made public to the world, could be of use to people at other schools who might find it in a Google search.

Also, sometimes, I post excellent student work to my blog (with permission), such as here... okay I lied. I can't find any links for that. But I know I have done it.

In short, lots of ways to deliver instruction TO STUDENTS and to receive submissions FROM STUDENTS.

OH and before I forget, the blog is a much better place to stash videos that I want to show in class as my YOU TUBE playlists are a vast overgrown, wilderness AND Google does not provide a quick way to search playlist by name.

So, things like this (which if you have not seen it, this video is GREAT):

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1685 - EPIC 2015









- And blogging is just FUN and as my students will tell you, I am always trying out the FUN in the key of FUNK (the FUN in FUNKY).

Blogging is just FUN with a capital F.

Or as my students will tell you that I say all the time (too much?):

"I am putting the FUN in FUNky"

or

"Putting FUN in the key of FUNK."

Yeah, I am goofy.

I let my goofy, geek flag fly.

Word.

As this blog entry already shows, you can use lots of pictures, videos, links, and various colors (though don't go too crazy).

One fun thing I share all the time is Music!!

More on this in examples, but I am likely to insert a video of a song any time I think it will be fun, like this one:



SHARED HERE:

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1197 (SoD #1892) - THE CROSSROADS - Weekly Hodge Podge and Throwback

or while sharing about math, this one:



Comics! (xkcd)

It never hurts to take a break for fun. Though I write about comic books all the time, there are also cartoons or shorter form comics that regularly make an appearance on the blog, such as

the most awesome xkcd:




A Sense of Doubt blog post #1691 - xkcd - robots - Asimov's Laws - order

As a way to remember things like the BECHDEL TEST:

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1393 - Bechdel Test and other feminist tropes in SF and Assorted Media





Various cartoons and memes...




A Sense of Doubt blog post #1894 - Saturday humor - comics, cartoons, and memes while in lockdown


Or just a video clip from Looney Tunes that I chose to show in class one day because it is sort of about pronouns, and so why not make it a blog post and then I can always find it quickly and easily:



A Sense of Doubt blog post #1680 - "Shoot Me Now."

And so many more, which is why I have categories that sort comics, xkcd, and other content to help find it quickly and easily.



I WRITE FUN THINGS

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1380 - Please Help! Donate to Our Whiskey GoFundMe

My parody of people use GO FUND ME and other similar trends for reasons I find dubious at best.

me and my wife in Scotland in May 2015, Crieff, Scotland

Or my ongoing series about THINGS THAT SUCK (or THINGS THAT PISS ME OFF), in which one of my favorite things to do is to analyze signs that just don't make sense.

Like this one.

How does one prepay in advance of prepaying?

THINGS THAT SUCK #2: “Please PrePay in Advance”




Or obligatory comic book post.

I over hear someone say that comic books have been going downhill for the last ten years in the Longview game store, and I vehemently disagree, and so I write this:

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1439 - "Comics Are Going Downhill" - NOT!






WEEKLY FEATURES 

To help me manage, the rigors of broadcasting posts on a daily basis, I invented weekly features that I could depend on for content or bump from the schedule when the world presents something more pressing, like today is MUSICAL MONDAY but more on my shenanigans to post this blog entry AND a Musical Monday later.



MUSICAL MONDAY

I love music.

As my students will either woefully attest (those who leave in their ear buds as I soundtrack the start of class) or jubilantly (what is that track you played to start the break?), I have always played music in my class rooms, going back to the late 1980s when I started teaching and lugged a BOOM BOX into the class room and played early PE (Public Enemy) and was told "that's not music" or "shut that S%^$ off" by students that about ten years later are listening to Eminem.

And so the longest running and least bumped weekly feature is MUSICAL MONDAY in which I feature SOME MUSIC each week, either some new ambient purchases, a single video/song, or a mix that I will play in the class room. I have made so many music mixes that I made a post last year of the best of the best and a separate list of school ones.

AMBIENT

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1924 - Ambient in Memorium- Land Escape, Spektrmodules 55-57, and Assorted - Musical Monday for 2005.25

ONE SONG

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1952 - "Let it Be Me" - For Warren

MIXES

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1651 - Everybody Knows 2019 - Musical Monday for starting school - 1908.26
Just a cool mix with many pictures of women who amaze me:

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1847 - "It's up to you to be a Super-Hero" mix - Musical Monday for 2003.09


THE COLLECTED MIX PAGE

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1644 - Top Twenty Mixes - a Musical Monday post for 1908.19
And I am giving this presentation on MONDAY 9/14 (2009.14), but my post for it will be temporarily published a day early by using Blogger's tools to manipulate time because I wanted to publish my regular Musical Monday on Monday 2009.14:

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2036 - "41 shots - American Skin" - Musical Monday for 2009.14






WRITING WEDNESDAY

My initial idea was to reserve a single day each week to post some new and original fiction or poetry work, which has proven to be challenging (mostly impossible), though I have written ABOUT story plans, such as

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1919 - Genre: High and Low Suspense





And I have posted things about other writers or their writings (which also enhance instruction):

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1975 - "Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath

But also I just posted a lot of my old poems. Not doing that weekly, I have not yet run out of them.

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #414 - How Alice Trumbly Learned the Secret, a poem, Writerly Wednesday




THROWBACK THURSDAY and/or WEEKLY HODGE PODGE

So, if you have been on social media for a minute, you know that THURSDAY is THROWBACK THURSDAY.

This seemed like a good feature for me because initially I planned to just post a photo and a little bit of text each day -- K.I.S.S.

The fact that the average blog entry is probably well over 500 words and takes multiple scroll pushes on the wheel to get through the whole thing is a testament to my own peculiar illness of overdoing it, overwriting it, over-committing to it, and never being satisfied.

As my students will tell you, it's very true that when I die they will carve into my head stone near where some of my ashes are buried the phrase:

CHRIS TOWER, HE WANTED MORE

So, I started THROWBACK THURSDAY as one does with a photo and some text.



Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #520 - SNOW STORM & the collected photo series one thus far

and then the weekly post became a repository for so many things!!




Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #913 - Winter 1978 - Throwback Thursday with Many Blogs and Things 1801.04


and

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1156 - Magic at Band Follies 1978 - the WOUND - Throwback Thursday for 1903.14





And then, I abandoned the THROWBACK THURSDAY angle and made it THE WEEKLY HODGE PODGE or gallimaufry, which is word derived from the French for "stew," like hodge podge comes from the UK and Nova Scotia for mutton soup but is a jumble, a mixture, as the Taoists name it: the ten thousand things.

Lately the HODGE-PODGE has become an outlet for my activism about the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2020 election, Black Lives Matter, Police Brutality, and whatever else I dump into it each week (Baseball, space news, or when GEORGE RR MARTIN will finish the fr**t b&^%ling sixth book THE WINDS OF WINTER).





Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1196 (SoD #1885) - No More Nighthawks - Throwback Thursday 2004.16 and Hodge Podgery





Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1201 (SoD #1936) - It's Not Enough - WEEKLY HODGE PODGE for 2006.06


A Sense of Doubt blog post #2034 - Justice is what love looks like - Weekly Hodge Podge 2009.12




COMIC BOOK SUNDAY

When the pandemic began and we were in quarantine at home, shelter in place, stay home; stay safe, publishers could no longer publish comic books that are published and released to comic book shops every week.

And so I took my frequent posting about comic books to remind readers to support local businesses, especially comic book shops, but also to remind my self to take time for my number one selfcare activity: sports on the TV and reading a stack of comic books!

Now, for months and months, there was no sports unless I wanted to play old games, which I did sometimes. I say "play" as I am reading comic books so not quite "watching"as using sports as comforting and nostalgic background noise. Football is best for this ambience as there is so little action and many many breaks between minimal action.




A Sense of Doubt blog post #1867 - Stay in, Read Comics, Support Local Comic Shops: Comic book production suspended




A Sense of Doubt blog post #1902 - Comic book Sunday - Weekly, May 3, 2020





THE DAILY BOWIE

The day after I wish David Bowie a happy 69th birthday on my blog because he is far and away my favorite musical artists of all time, he dies.


Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #185 - Happy Birthday David Bowie


Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #187 - David Bowie Dies 1601.10 at age of 69




And so, because I am quite insane, in addition to my daily blog post for HEY MOM (more on this below), I started posting a DAILY BOWIE feature to commemorate my favorite musical artist and keep this up for 70 days straight and 82 days in all.



The Daily Bowie #42 - "Panic in Detroit"






BLOG DESIGNS, GADGETS, AND DOODADS

If you choose to make a blog and use BLOGGER, there's all sorts of doodads and gadgets you can add to the design that will appear on every page.


Here's a quick rundown of what I have populated on SENSE OF DOUBT:

• Top, banner explanation of the blog and its name
• link to the first HEY MOM post
• "hello, what's this" cool image
• list of my other blogs
• graphic link to the ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION
• another image: COSMIC THRILLS!!
• mini-bio
• picture of SATCHEL
• SENSE OF DOUBT STATUS NOTE
• a blog about a former job
• my logo
• explanation of my logo
• the video from which the blog SENSE OF DOUBT gets its name
• link to my tumblr
• link to my GOOD READS
• another image: THING-O-RAMA
• List of blogs I like to read
• more "about me"
• blog archive by date
• labels (also called categories) sorting blog posts by topic
• a link to a blog I liked
• my first name in Japanese
• another cool image
• followers (hey, FOLLOW ME!!) :-)

HOW I STARTED BLOGGING SO MUCH

As stated previously, I started blogging in 2007 thinking a couple of things. I wanted to set myself a frequent writing practice, which then was weekly on Friday afternoons when I would find myself alone in the house, which was rare at that time. I tend to write better in solitude, though like all of you, I so rarely get solitude.

I started SENSE OF DOUBT as my main blog. I also started another blog, RANDITION SWOOM, which to this day has just one post.

On SENSE OF DOUBT, My first two blogs posts are these:

THE “New and Improved” INVISIBLE WOMAN: Does she look like she needs protecting?
and

“Keeping Misogyny Alive and Well for Geeks Nationwide”
both of which were meant to be drafts to try out content and then submit to BITCH MAGAZINE, then headquartered in San Francisco, now in Portland.

Both articles were nicely and encouragingly rejected, but the second one about misogyny in the NBC show HEROES has enjoyed 2375 views in thirteen years, the most of any post of mine ever. And I don't think that's all readers interested in feminist analysis of TV.



My first six years of trying to blog were sporadic and unproductive, especially once I got married in 2009 and my free time became a more rare thing.

And then I had an idea.

365 T-SHIRTS

I was cleaning stuff out of my parents' house as they were set to move to a smaller place, and I noticed that I had A LOT OF T-SHIRTS. Knowing I wanted to do more blogging and failing to achieve my goal (because, you know, LIFE), I had the idea to count t-shirts with the blog. What if I took a picture of myself with the featured t-shirt every day and wrote a little about it, would I have 365 or fewer? (Or more?) Answer: more, though I did buy a couple of dozen during that year.

I dismissed the idea as narcissistic and self-indulgent.

If you have spent a minute on social media, you know how it feeds narcissism and the overly self-involved, traits I am trying to discard and yet have in abundance.

I decided that no one would want to read such a thing and that I probably didn't have time for it anyway.

And then two months later I found out I had prostate cancer. A week later, at the comic book shop, a t-shirt arrived.

Suddenly, the idea to do this blog seemed much more appealing not because I didn't still think it was narcissistic, I did, but because I no longer cared what people would think. I had cancer.

And so I began daily broadcasts of blogs about t-shirts and what the t-shirts mean to my life.


Here's the first one:

T-shirt #1: Son of Satan
The idea was to keep it short: a picture and a little text.

That trend did not last.



There were plenty of shirts:
concert shirts,
shirts from Ultimate,
comic book shirts,
sports shirts,
shirts from movies and TV,
and so many more.

And lost of pictures.

Eventually, I found ways to write about whatever I wanted with some of the less meaningful shirts.

But after a year, I quit, I returned to SENSE OF DOUBT, and






I tried to keep up with a WEEKLY PRODUCTION on SENSE OF DOUBT after doing daily, one would think that would be easy after doing daily posts (and really, I wanted to do two-three a week).

Not so much.

With the pressure off, it was difficult to keep to the schedule.

Weekly Comics List for 1406.04




I liked being a daily blogger, and I kind of missed it.

After two years off, something happened that gave me a reason to go back to daily posts, and I have been posting daily ever since.

My mother died on July 4th, 2015.

New feature: Hey, Mom! Talking to my mother #1 - the explanation


Two days later, I decided to carry on my conversations with her with daily blog posts with a feature called HEY MOM that I continued daily for three years and 1096 posts.

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1096 - The Last Daily, Consecutive Hey Mom Post



I still post HEY MOM posts infrequently (though I originally intended two per week), here's the last one:

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1211 (SoD #2025) - I Need to Take a Break





HOW OFTEN TO BLOG?

So as I have revealed over and over, I post daily.

Though I am clearly quite insane and have killed millions of brain cells with my punk rock lifestyle until I was 75 years old.

Many of you may find weekly to be an achievable goal, and especially one that allows you to post a lot of original material.

However, it may be more useful to just post whenever you want. If you have three instruction related things to post in a single week and then go a month with no posts, your blog may well still be useful and a good resource.

I like daily posting because I want to be producing something for myself and my interest on a daily basis, and even though I struggle to write a lot of original content daily, I have to put something together every day, even if it's a share, there's always a few words of my own original content in each post every day.

It's a writing practice.

EXERCISE.

"Do or do not. There is not try."





WHAT TO BLOG? - WHAT THE BLOG LOOKS LIKE


WHY BLOG AND NOT USE PAGES IN CANVAS?

You can do pretty much everything with a Canvas page as I can do with this blog. Others, like my colleague Amber Lemiere, post using a web site (WEEBLY).

The main reasons I can think to suggest using a blog are the chance for additional exploration of the entire blog or other blogs and clicking on all the gadgets and things as well as storing material outside of Canvas.

I may not "own" my content as Google hosts it for me on BLOGGER, as I have mentioned, it has been on my to do list for a while to export all my content to my own domain name and host it all, from now on, with WORD PRESS and then archived out of Google, I do truly own it, control it, and can access it without GOOGLE's help. Also, because Google is migrating all of us BLOGGER users to a new interface, which I hate, but I will spare you that rant.

Also, copyright. I do not think AT ALL about copyright. We all share things on social media without any compunction about copyright. In many cases, content producers encourage you to share their creations because this is how they go viral. And since I do not make any money from my blog or use any advertisements, then I am also insulated from any copyright infringement if someone were to come after me, and no one has.



LEARNING EXAMPLES

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1117 - Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon - Plate of Shrimp - HEY MOM REPRINT

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1019 - College is bad for the country

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1573 - Cult of Outrage

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1604 - What Really Happens in Schrodinger's Box?



WRITING EXAMPLES

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1967 - Always Have a Book With You, a feature article about chris tower


A Sense of Doubt blog post #1386 - The SWITCHEROO - Return of Wolverine, Justice League, etc.


Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #383 - Recent Book Reviews - part two - Bleak House


A Sense of Doubt blog post #2004 - Does this happen to you and no such thing as writer's block?





INSTRUCTION EXAMPLES - writing

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1890 - Writing summaries in College English and Composition Courses


A Sense of Doubt blog post #1905 - UNFREAKING THE FEAR OF ENGLISH - Don't be afraid...


A Sense of Doubt blog post #1828 - Things to Keep in Mind When Drafting a Research Paper




INSTRUCTION EXAMPLES - math, computer science

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1836 - - Talking Polymathy


A Sense of Doubt blog post #1636 - A collection of my C programs with examples of documentation


A Sense of Doubt blog post #1626 - Programmers don't read BOOKS and other BS





FUN EXAMPLES

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1987 - The first time I heard David Bowie - Musical Monday for 2007.27




Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1206 (SoD #1977) - - Young and the Restless suspended production returns




A Sense of Doubt blog post #1823 - Happy Horny Werewolf Day





A Sense of Doubt blog post #1498 - Welcome Back Baseball - 2019 - I need you



COMIC BOOKS

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #624 - My Oldest - A collection of comic books - part one


A Sense of Doubt blog post #1290 - Captain America for Labor Day - T-shirt reprint



A Sense of Doubt blog post #1776 - BATMAN 1966 - 1970 - a selection


T-shirt #119: Doctor Strange


A Sense of Doubt blog post #2028 - Comic books and Racism part one


A Sense of Doubt blog post #2030 - Your Black Friend and anti-racism comic book reading list - pt2






MUSIC

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2029 - Sade - Live 2011


A Sense of Doubt blog post #2008 - Swing Down Sweet Chariot - Musical Monday for 2008.17


A Sense of Doubt blog post #1973 - "Why Don't you Go Ahead and Turn off the Sun" - A Musical Mix for Monday 2007.13






TIME PERMITTING

QUESTIONS???

Open thread!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

OR JUST UNMUTE

MAKE A BLOG


A live demonstration.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2009.15 - 10:10

- Days ago = 1901 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.