I have used blogs before. I had a Tumblr at some point — not quite a blog, technically “social media,” but still a blog — and I have used various blogs in different classes throughout my post-secondary education. I’ve written content for a nationally known financial product comparison website’s personal financial blog. For the latter, I was merely responsible for the copy and basic linkage coding. I was not responsible for the actual posting of the content as I was working freelance. It operated on WordPress, but I didn’t really have to learn WordPress.

 

My past experience with blogs, then, is not non-existent but minimal and superficial.

 

Each of those cases in the past were quite simple. Go to here, post. Write copy, send to editor for posting. There was a bit of a learning curve writing the financial blog posts as I had to learn basic SEO skills — none of which I already had — and veeeeeeery basic HTML.  Setting up this blog, in theory, should have been quite simple.

 

And, in theory, it was. I had someone familiar with what they were doing give me step by step instructions with detailed text and useful screen captures who was there to answer any questions I had. It was also a group process, so those of us who are less familiar with WordPress and Internet-ing in general — yes, I’m in my 20s, no, I am not very technically proficient — could group source assistance.

 

So the actual setting up of the blog and creating this first post — with little required outside of text and before we need to personalize colours, formats, etc. and learn how to properly embed, link out, etc. — has been a breeze.

 

However, the context in which I have been setting up this blog and writing this post are very different than when I’ve set up and/or used blogs in the past. My academic blogs were all text-based — I know how to write text. My Tumblr was personal and I didn’t really need to learn how to do anything. Writing for that website was a bit more stressful — I was unemployed at the time, writing freelance articles, and trying to learn a lot about SEO and basic HTML in a very, very short period of time as I was trying to parlay my freelanced articles into a job at the company (I didn’t get it — I worked my butt off, made it through the interview, got to the case study assignment, and they hired the overqualified guy). That was stressful, but my focus was entirely on learning what I needed to learn to try to be competitive for that job.

 

This time around, I am learning or being introduced to a lot of things at once.  This made everything a lot harder. I am not particularly tech-savvy, as I admitted to earlier, and tech was never a big part of my education. I was working in service when COVID hit so I was laid off, waiting to move back out here, so I wasn’t required for any purposes to be online, learn online, or create online. I also have no hobbies for which I’ve had to learn much tech — cake decorating and making homemade danishes require nothing more than an ability to Google recipes, watch Youtube videos, and follow bakers on Instagram (three technical skills I do feel I have mastered). I never got into photography, music, videography, or anything else you’d need to use editing software for. I’ve never tried to create learning games.

 

I feel behind before most tasks have actually begun for the secondary PDP program.

 

The process, then, has made me think a lot about the personal contexts in which learning happens or is expected to happen. In most other contexts, setting up this blog, posting in a timely manner, learning how to personalize and embellish, etc. would, I think, be relatively simple tasks for me to do. Add the context of learning new tech for 6 different classes, in an academic discipline with which I am just becoming acquainted with, spending every educational moment on my computer screen, doing schooling completely online in the middle of a global catastrophe, after having recently moved across the country, and these simple tasks become monumental.

 

Perhaps that’s a little overdramatic, but that context has certainly made simple tasks much more challenging.

 

This leads me to thinking about the expectations I’ll have of students when I’m a practicing teacher. Each of them will have multiple classes with hosts of different expectations and will be required to acquire skills that they won’t already have. How do we craft our expectations for students — their learning, their skill acquisition, their time management, etc. — when they exist in these personal, vastly different life and learning contexts? How do we account for this for ourselves and for others? How can we be responsive to the ability and needs of our students?