I used to have a consistent regimen every morning: read the news, then read the posts in my blog network.

What’s a blog network? Yes, well, that’s part of what’s broken for me right now.

In 2003, I began my thirteen years (give or take) in formal leadership jobs related to teaching and learning technologies. (“Administration” doesn’t quite describe this, for me, but will be a useful if damning shortcut for many.) Right away I met some inspiring people, at conferences and elsewhere, who were blogging. I learned about various flavors of blog code, domains, shared hosting, and the surprisingly low cost for it all. I could see right away how powerful this combination could be, and indeed already was for those inspiring people I was meeting. When I found WordPress and saw its motto Code Is Poetry, I knew I’d found my platform.

I’ve always done my best writing under the influence of other writers. When I wrote my dissertation, my favorite environment for writing always included a semicircle of six, eight, or even ten open books around me. (Yes, I was not always careful with their spines, and all I can say is that prior readers hadn’t been either, so I don’t think I added any damage.) I tried to bring all the voices in those books into a networked conversation I could weave together with my own voice to arrive at new insights. I could forget myself and find myself that way, and keep going–always the hardest part for me, just to keep going.

It was that way with blogs, too. Reading other blogs inspired me to start keeping my own blog. When I started blogging, back in 2004, I relied on something called a blogroll to guide me. The inspiring bloggers I’d begun to meet in my new role at work would usually have a list of blogs they habitually read right there on their sites’ front pages. Nothing algorithmic about it. I liked blogger X, blogger X read blogs A, B, C, D, and just like that, I had some trusted recommendations I could follow up on. (We would sometimes talk about the danger of echo chambers, but as we now know, the real echo chambers would be built, maintained, and expanded by the machines that would make “connection” into a business and, now, into something very treacherous and destructive.)

Of course I also had something to aspire to, which never hurts. As I started out, I hoped to keep a blog that would be interesting enough for those bloggers I admired to add my site to their blogroll. And sometimes, that happened. I always found that moment deeply affirming. I guess anyone would.

Soon I discovered the RSS reader–I don’t remember my first one, sadly–and I found I could not only expand my daily blog read, but import other bloggers’ expanded blogrolls via OPML, a meta-list format I could import into my reader, just like that. OPML became essential as I added more blogging to course requirements and found myself with many student blogs to read every day–which sounds daunting, but was in fact an almost uniformly joyous experience, as I could suddenly see into the process of my students’ learning in a depth and detail I had always yearned for but never quite achieved.

Eventually I would spend an hour, maybe more, each morning reading blogs. I had my reading nicely curated, and I came to rely on trusted, varied, enlightening, and provocative voices in my head every single day as I began my work. And I would always have those voices to bring to my own blogging, in one way or another.

I still ask my students to blog, depending on the course of study. I still read every one of their posts, carefully and thoughtfully. But that morning sweep of my expanded, RSS-driven, OPML-augmented blog horizons? That’s been gone for several years, to my own detriment I believe.

There are still some reliable, trusted voices in what we used to call the blogosphere, voices that I now hear only intermittently. Some of those voices have themselves become intermittent now, but even at that, they’ve kept the faith all along–and my broken good habits mean I lose the thread, to my detriment, and to my regret. So part of my Lenten blogging resolve must include once again the discipline of reading some of those blogs every day.

Reading those blogs will be painful at times, because for almost five years I have had no formal leadership role in the area of teaching and learning technologies. Since those roles brought me into the blogging world, trying to re-enter the blogging world brings with it a keen fresh sense of absence and loss. Obviously withdrawal only worsens a sense of isolation–the vicious cycle anyone with depressive tendencies will recognize right away from their own experience–so there’s no real relief from pain, only a set of welcome and even undeniably important distractions. But a chronic ache is still painful, and can demolish hope just as surely a sudden crisis can.

The more I stopped reading, the more I stopped writing. And it’s only a blog, and who reads that anyway, and this is 2021 and even the word “blog” starts to sound like “victrola” and “picture shows” and maybe even “daguerreotype.” At best, perhaps “retro-cool,” which carries more than a whiff of hipster with it.

And to be honest, I also stopped reading because the conversation around what we might call “edtech” (but I hope we won’t) became more and more polarized, and the grandstanding became harder to avoid, in others and also in myself. Too many rallies, too much theater, too little reflection, too few good-faith conversations.

There were also my presentations to colleagues that would leave me slack-jawed with amazement at the anti-blogging frenzy that could emerge at a moment’s notice. At Mary Washington, a dean told me (in a meeting) that if I had asked her to reflect on her learning when she was an undergraduate, she would have “punched [me] in the nose.” (That stopped an early conversation around e-portfolios.) Many years later, at VCU, a colleague assured me that asking students to blog would inevitably lead them into contacts with dangerous strangers in chat rooms and a cascade of assaults would follow.  That the real risks came from algorithmically-driven, advertising-supported platforms–what we now call “social media”–never entered these conversations. But here we are.

Now as it turns out, RamPages happened anyway, and is one of the things I am proudest of having helped to bring to pass as a leader. (Roll credits: a congenial and far-sighted CIO at VCU was very supportive, a crucial ally in fact; and by far the lion’s share of the credit for RamPages’ success goes to a lion named Tom Woodward, a truly gifted writer and thinker who’s equally talented on the bridge and in the engine room. Tom’s a real thought leader, one who for me conspicuously rehabilitates that shopworn phrase, as you’ll see right away on his epic account of the RamPages odyssey.) And it’s true that one of my failings is that I can’t always take “yes” for an answer. But I tell this story to try to articulate why and how, over the last few years, I’ve lost both nerve and heart when it comes to blogging. I’m also trying to explore the simultaneous breakdown of my blog reading and my blog writing, as I think they’re both part of the same heartsick hunkering.

And while it was very encouraging to see some heartfelt responses to my blog post yesterday, I’m also trying not to think about responses, but to think about telling the story of my learning, Even and especially if I’m only talking publicly to my public self. I’m trying to rediscover the deep and challenging value in that discourse. It’s always right here, and by the end of a post, I’ve always found it again.

Now to keep going, and to renew the reading.

See you tomorrow.

Epiphany’s past. Now 40 days in the wilderness, with the last seven veering from triumph to catastrophe, then to eucatastrophe.

What will I give up for Lent?

Plenty left to give up. I am privileged, fortunate, well (so far), warm, dry, not hungry, able to telework. Power’s on, larder’s stocked. Movies and music and books in the queue. Many pleasures to consider as candidates for my mortifying, the process of remembering that I come from dust and will return to dust.

Then I remember all that I, even in my privilege, have given up, many of them things we have all given up. Hugs. Visits from our children, our kin, our friends. Holiday gatherings. Outings. Varied possibilities for gathering to listen to music, or make music together. (So cruel that singing together stimulates contagion–what fresh hell that is.) Seeing a movie in a cinema. Not being hyper-careful.

Given up: Trust. Relaxed non-vigilance. Loud convivial shared meals in restaurants. Browsing in bookstores and record stores.  The pizza slice I’d buy each day at a pizza place near my office at school, where I’d enjoy the added deliciousness of greeting the cooks and the staff, who would sometimes ask me what I was reading that day, and who other times would tell me of interesting conferences they’d attended the week before. All these infinite worlds of folks I’d see in a workaday world who’d stand revealed, moment to moment, as portals to a multiverse of infinite interest and human kindness.

Hard to stop once the list gets going.

And then the losses that were on the way, anyway: I’ve lost a friend and mentor and colleague who died a few months before the pandemic, a beloved father-in-law who died just before lockdown, a mentor and a complicated, flawed teacher-scholar-hero who died just after.

My sense of time is blurred, less reliable than usual, sometimes deceptive. I begin and end many days feeling murky.

And then there’s democracy, justice, equity. Good faith. All fragile. All torn.

So what will I give up for Lent?

What will be suitably mortifying in a season of such death already?

I want to give up silence for Lent.

I have gradually hidden myself behind all the things I must not, should not, dare not, had better not write about. To write anything would be to bring it all to mind in a way I believed to be dangerous to my ability to do the things that had to be done, carefully, deliberately, consistently, vigilantly, especially during a pandemic when it seems that literal and metaphoric contagion would blast their way into any opening–especially the openings here, on Gardner Writes.

Better to keep quiet, better not to write, better to be very careful indeed. Better to hunker down.

Looks like the English-speaking world is approaching peak hunker. I’m glad to think it’s not just me.

At times I think my hunkering has been like that second definition, at least I hope so. But today, Ash Wednesday, I must also say that I have, for several years, taken shelter in a defensive position of silence. And I want to give up silence for Lent.

I don’t know exactly what that will mean, except that I will do my utmost to write in this space each day during this season. That’s as far as I can see right now. That’s probably enough.

And now that I’ve said what I’m giving up for Lent, perhaps I have made a little vow, here where you’ve heard it. Perhaps it will help.

A special thanks to Jon Udell, who inspired me to stop being silent, and to Tom Woodward, who sealed the deal with his post on Shrove Tuesday.

See you tomorrow.