Caveat: Here and There, A Bloggablog

Last week, because of my little surgical event, I missed a few days of posts to my "work blog." As I was catching up on these posts, yesterday at work, I noticed I had reached 1000 posts on my work blog. 

Compared to this blog, I think for most people my work blog wouldn't be very interesting. Then again, this blog isn't that interesting, either.

The "work blog" is not really a blog, at all – I'm just using the blog format (which I'm comfortable with) as a way to post a sort of "diary" about each class that I teach. My students, their parents, or my fellow teachers can consult it to find out answers to burning questions like, "what's my homework?" or watch the kids doing one of my videographed speech tasks. Indeed, although it's a minority, I have many students who use the blog to find out their homework or to watch their classmates embarrassing themselves for my camera. The Korean web portal I use as a platform makes the blog accessible to the students even from their ubiquitous smartphones.

Since sometime in the Spring, I've been diligent and faithful about posting an entry for each class I teach – if only to minimally write, "We had class. No homework." Normally, there is at least a sentence about homework. On about 20% of posts, there is some collateral, i.e. a video embedded or a scanned image of some student work – although sometimes I get a little bit behind (as I am now), so the most recent blog entries sometimes contain little place-holders "" where I will insert video when I get around to posting them (which is not that hard but is a bit time-consuming, so it has to happen during "free time" at work, currently hard to come by).

So 1000 blog entries means, roughly, 1000 class sessions taught.

I wish we had a platform, at work, that was in some way like this but was being maintained by ALL the teachers. I think it would go a long way toward solving Karma's perennial marketing problem and allow us to establish our own "web presence" – which it's really hard to conceive of a business not having in 2016. Yet… such as it is. We don't have an IT department. I'm not personally able or willing to take on that role, in a context where every interaction with a computer or Korean website must be tackled with a dictionary (because these computers, here, they speak Korean, y'know).

Jared's Karma Blog

[daily log: walking, 6km]

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