The pain and the agony

I should have just kept my domain hosting updated to my most current email address. Months ago I forgot to renew the domain for my site "Cultivating Minds" at the same time that I was starting to not like that blog title anyway. Actually, I found the title of that limited. First of all, I'm not a big gardener. Second of all, the title seemed to presume that minds are something that should be..."cultivated." As my thoughts about learning and lifelong learning evolve, this metaphor just doesn't work for me. Learners need to take responsibility for their own interests, and while formal education can be helpful in guiding people in directions that they hadn't previously considered and posing provocative questions, it's less about something I as an educator do for others and more about the avenues that people open for themselves with guidance. Maybe if I'd called it "cultivating learning?" But why did I ever think that people's minds were something to be tilled. (Never mind the potential puns as this naming moves from tilling to webbing, but I digress).

But that's besides the point. When blogging, it feels important to have a home. I have blogged in a bunch of different places, but it makes me feel scattered. When foraging through the many tools available on the internet, it feels important to have a cohesive identity. (I want to note that this state of multiphrenia is well-noted in CMC literature, but not succinctly in a manner that would make sense to link.) I'm tying more of my disparate resources into one place. What's posted here is a start of identity organization, and it will continue to morph over time.

So even though this blog probably isn't much to look at, it's the result of several days of wrestling with my hosting to get out of some circular redirect loop that wouldn't let me just point my content differently, dumping data from one table to another in phpmyadmin and all sorts of other contortions. And now the colors are making me bored. As I said, work in progress, but at least we have a start.