If you still read this blog, you are probably astonished by the sudden explosion of posts after such a long quiet spell. I gave up blogging during Lent for the most part, but this is the weekend and as you can see, I have some catching up to do. (and this got long -- so for the short version skip to the end).
I have been thinking hard about what to do about blogging after Easter next week, when my Lenten restriction is over. My provisional decision is to focus on this blog and neglect the various other ones. My reasoning is that this blog is the one that is the most in tune with what I am trying to do with blogging, at least in this season of my life. I am not really a crafty or artistic blogger, as you can certainly tell. Nor am I very political -- at least politics of homeschooling is a genre that is very well done by others already. I do like to write and philosophize, but when I focus on blogging from a literary or philosophical perspective, I end up letting everything else slide and I am not sure it pays off in terms of helping me live out my role better. While I was on this blogging break I did so much real work on planning and implementing things in the homeschool. Yes, I still wasted lots of time browsing the internet, but at least I was browsing for a purpose directly related to my homeschool (but the house got really messy -- can never seem to do it all).
So I'm experimenting now with limited practical blogging. I love to have a community and share resources. E-groups and message boards like Real Learning are much more interactive than blogs, though, at least the way I do it. They fill the "cyber-community" longing for me much more than blogging usually does. I am personally much more of a responsive-type writer than a proactive one, so my blogging very often becomes rather inwardly turned and I don't really like that. I have found the "post-- comment" format extremely limiting though there are some bloggers/commenters that have transcended the limitations, and you probably know who you are already. It just isn't a comfortable dynamic for me, which is why I read many more blogs than I ever comment on.
But blogs are definitely an easy way to share ideas and resources and you do "meet" some people you might not get a chance to meet in a targeted e-group like the two classical lists I moderate or help moderate. So for that reason I'm reluctant to give up blogging altogether.
As to the details -- I am not really planning to do the daily logs anymore on here because they were taking up 15 minutes per day and were mostly redundant, as I found when I stopped doing them. So instead I'll probably be focusing more on lesson plans and occasionally a "typical day" or "learning notes" or "how we use a particular book or resource".
