Spring into Writing

I love a new year!  It is a time to refresh and jump-start new things or revamp, revise or revisit old things.  What I love about teaching is that I get two new years in a year aka the new school year in August and the new year in January.  It helps me stay on track!  Why am I making you blog?  Digital writing matters.  As you will discover, it fosters a different community from our face-to-face one.

I created my first blog in March 2011.  I didn’t write on it for a year.  Then in March 2012, a friend challenged me to  join the Slice of Life Daily Writing Challenge and I did.  I blogged and commented on a minimum of 3 SOLWC bloggers posts for 31 days straight.  I have now completed that challenge for 4 years straight and have worked as the tech support for the past two.  I can’t resist a challenge.  I do participate in that community throughout the year with their weekly SOL post. This fall, however, I have not been as motivated.  Hence this spring, a time for me to rev up my blogging. I then co-crafted a similar challenge for my freshmen with my best-teacher/friend (BFT) where we did a two week challenge with our classes.  We even got our dean to participate.

Since May 2012, I kept playing with the practice, first with my graduate students, and then with all my UCF students for past the two years.  Each time I learn something new and change it up. Your challenge this spring is to create and maintain a blog and participate in a digital writing community.  Our work is to uncover the work of digital writing, the power of a virtual writing community and figure out how this could work with students.  Part of your challenge will be setting aside the time to write. Part of your challenge will be letting go of finding the perfect words and the perfectly composed piece.  Part of your challenge will committing to responding to others.  You will finish. That I do know.

If you don’t know what to write, check out these posts by former students:

Cindy or Brian or Catherine or Janeen or Embree