I write this daily-ink on a blog at Daily-Ink.DavidTruss.com but I’m pretty sure that’s not were people go to find it. When a new post gets published, it also goes to:
I then share it to my Facebook Story and page.
These social media sites are where my daily posts get seen… but are they read? If you’ve read this far, can you please let me know where you found this post?
Thanks!
It was bound to happen. In fact, it might have happened before this and I simply didn’t notice. Writing a daily blog since mid July, I just caught myself sharing the same idea twice. It wasn’t until I published the idea that I caught myself rinsing and repeating the same idea.
Yesterday was the second time that I wrote about asking ‘What’s the third option?‘ when looking to make a tough decision. The first time I wrote about this was back at the start of November, three and a half months ago. The post, ‘Between a Rock and a Hard Place (and…)‘, was the original post, and it is an identical idea, except with greater detail than yesterday’s post.
I had no memory of sharing the idea before. In fact I would not have known that I did this had I not reread the post after publishing it. As I reached the end, I noticed the original title in the ‘Related’ posts section. Clicking on it, I realized very quickly what I had done.
What prompted the rewrite was a conversation with someone who refused to allow any suggestion of a third option. Why I started this post saying, ‘it was bound to happen’ is because part of writing is helping to formulate and express ideas in a concrete way. The process helps me put ideas together in a way that defines my thoughts on an idea more clearly.
However, over three months later, I’m not remembering whether I shared the idea through my writing, I’m just thinking about an idea that is in my head. At first, it was interesting to me that the second post was less detailed than the original. Then, I realized that the first post was written on a Saturday, and it made sense because I give myself more time to write on weekends.
I’m sure this will happen again. I will have moments when my creative juices are flowing and I’ll share fresh ideas… or at least fresh ideas to me. And I’ll have moments when I end up recycling or repeating older ideas. The process of writing every day will lead to some repetition, hopefully though, the ideas I choose to repeat are worth reading and thinking about again. I probably won’t re-share this idea of sharing my repeats again even if I catch myself, but if you catch me doing this, please feel free to let me know.
Last night I (re)read, “(Digital) Identity in a World that No Longer Forgets”, by Alec Couros and Katia Hildebrandt. I say ‘(re)read’ because I thought I was reading this article, written in October 2015, for the first time… but when I looked at it again today, I saw the first comment on the article was by me. The internet might not forget, but I do!
In the article, this sentence really struck me:
“In a world where forgetting is no longer possible, we might instead work towards greater empathy and forgiveness.”
We need to recognize that people are allowed to make mistakes. Take the time to read the article by Alec and Katia. These things matter when measuring the severity of someone’s digitally inappropriate contribution: Context and intended audience, intent, history, authorship, and empathy (and forgiveness).
If we treat every transgression on the internet with the same level of disgust and anger, then comparatively we are reducing the level of anger and upset over truly appalling and disturbing comments and behaviours. Furthermore, we are creating an unforgiving and un-empathetic society, that does not allow us to apologize and/or learn from our mistakes.
I’ve written about this in my post ‘Resilience #OneWord2020‘, and I’ll end with a quote from that post:
In Online Spaces:
People will make mistakes online. They will say things that are unintentionallyhurtful, or blindly offensive. This is different than someone being intentionally biased and rude. If the slander is intentional, it should be reported. If it is unintentional, even to the point of ignorance, we need to be more resilient about what our responses are. When every transgression is treated with an attack, the most severe/bigoted/rude/biased transgressions are not given the heightened alarm that they deserve. With lesser errors and mistakes, we need to let people have a venue to recognize their errors and invite conversation rather than damnation.
Growing up, I heard the playground retort to taunts, “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never harm me.” We are past the era of letting nasty people say whatever nasty things they want, and just turning the other cheek to pretend we are not hurt. This is a good thing. We want to live in a world where that behaviour is not acceptable. But it does not serve us well to treat the attacker like they can not repent or be sorry.
I’ve been writing my daily posts for over 6 months now and some of them come off as if I’m writing some sort of advice column… like yesterday’s post on Undermining Self-Sabotage.
I say things like,
It’s the small thing that you can do today that move you to a bigger goal. Small, repeatable things that become habits. These small things undermine self-sabotage. When you surround yourself with small positive, incremental changes, your trajectory changes, and the people around you notice.
But despite addressing the writing to you, admittedly, I’m talking to myself. The book I shared in yesterday’s post, Atomic Habits by James Clear, was very influential to me. I read it at a time when I was making some really positive changes in some areas of my life, but not in others. I still have more work to do.
If I come off as preachy, or like I’m sharing some sagely advice, please know that I’m doing it from a position where I’m trying to take my own advice too. Atomic Habits is one of many great books I listened to last year. If I don’t actively reflect and write about what I’m learning, I won’t really have learned anything. And if I change the pronouns in the quote above to I/me/myself then to me my writing sounds self-centered, and even pretentious.
By the very nature of writing a public journal, I find myself talking to you, the reader, and you get to share my journey. So, when I give it, please feel free to take my advice, or to take my advice with a grain of salt. In reality, I’m talking to myself, and sharing it in the open. Free advice from me, to me, and as it turns out, for you too… if you find it useful.
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Oh, and by the way, if you think some of the things I say are full of crap, please let me know! It’s bound to happen. When I’m trying to pump out a different idea every day, at some point(s) I’ll be deluding myself in some way, but I’m probably too close to the idea to see the error in my thinking. That’s when I would most appreciate a comment or a question to help me learn and grow.
I’ll leave you with one last quote from James Clear,
“I didn’t start out as a writer. I became one through my habits“
Thank you for joining me in the practice of this daily habit.
Yesterday’s post on ‘What does it mean to be conscious‘ was an exercise in thinking for me. I’ve been watching lectures and trying to formulate ideas around consciousness and free will, but my ideas are not fully formed.
Writing allows me to think ‘out loud’ in a way that would be difficult otherwise. I can change my mind as I go, rework ideas, and try to ask and answer questions that would not arise had I not taken the time to share my written thoughts.
However when I look back on yesterday’s post, I see a rough draft, not a final copy. I see the need to expand on some ideas and to clarify others. But I took advantage of a lazy Sunday and spent hours writing. I can’t keep that up. I have to accept that if I’m writing to help me think, and choosing to share this daily, then at times my writing will need to go out in draft form.
If I didn’t do this, then I’d need more daily time than I can give to my writing, or I will have to choose not to publish on some days. I prefer to keep going and accept that sometimes my writing will just be an expression of my thoughts ‘out loud’, and not my final thoughts on a topic.
I’m close to 6 months into writing daily, and I’m now at a point where I will read an old post and won’t remember exactly what I wrote or why I wrote it? Reflecting on my less-remembered work, I can really look at the quality of my writing and recognize areas of strength and weakness… that I’m not able to see when I’m in the process of writing as thinking. After I’ve written something, I think I need a little time before I can meaningfully digest, reflect, and learn further from my own writing. I’ll have to revisit yesterday’s post in the new year. For now, I’ll just need to leave it in draft form.
I was playing around with scheduling posts late Thursday night. I had already planned to share Missing out – The Art of Miscommunication as my Friday post, when I decided to write and share Harnessing the Power and Potential of Social Media to Build Learning Communities #CDNedtech19 as a resource for the round table discussion I was running at the conference Friday afternoon. So, I thought the ‘Missing out‘ post could be today’s Daily-Ink. However, I made a mistake and ended up publishing them both yesterday morning. So, today I thought I’d take a look back and share some of the more popular posts so far:
This final post I’m sharing isn’t as popular as the ones above, but it is something I enjoyed writing, and I think it has an important message:
10. Ideas on a Spectrum The world seems so bipolar right now! Topics that used to be on an ideological or political spectrum have become dichotomies.
I’ve enjoyed writing daily since mid July. My routines (see #5 above) have made it a habit that is sustainable and much less like work. To be honest, I haven’t spent a lot of time looking at the stats, and it was nice to look at them for this post. While I don’t have a huge audience, and I am writing primarily for myself, it does feel good to know there is an audience out there. And with that, I would like to thank you for taking the time to join me, even if just occasionally, on my daily writing journey.
So, I woke up early to meditate, write, and work out. It took an hour and a half of muttering about before I got to the meditation, didn’t write until now, hours later as I’m about to head out on errands with my wife, and I still haven’t had my workout. (And my run-on sentence suggests I still shouldn’t be writing.)
I know I’m on holidays. I knew I’d be writing today. I will workout before the day is over. But dang, it’s hard to get motivated sometimes!
I’m going to need to start making this a habitual routine before the school year starts. If it isn’t dialed-in by the start of school, it won’t be something I continue.
Right now meditation is daily, writing is daily, and exercise is 4 times a week. I think I need to add 3 days of stretching and make all three things (meditation, writing, and fitness), part of my daily routine. A routine I do to start every day, without interruption or procrastination.
M is for Motivation… what are you motivated to do?
Two apps have made me realize how the world is changing. These apps are very popular, but not here in North America. Here, a very popular app for connecting with others for business (as well as socially) is Slack – a messaging app for teams.
However, pop over to India and WhatsApp is the cool tool that everyone is using. “Simple. Personal. Real Time Messaging.”
And hop over to China (as I did just recently) and WeChat is the tool that is already ‘Connecting a half billion people’… A HALF A BILLION PEOPLE!
One of my students, Brandon Mayhew, was invited to the Facebook F8 Developer’s conference, and he wrote about Mark Zukerberg’s opening presentation and an ongoing theme he heard, “4.1 Billion was repeated several times at the event and that’s the number of people that aren’t connected to the internet, over the next few years facebook plans on investing heavily on infrastructure to help connect these people in these remote regions of the globe.”
As an interesting aside, Facebook bought WhatsApp… for 19 Billion Dollars!
When over 1/3 of the world’s population lives in just two countries, and when those countries are on a fast track to get everyone connected… it is easy to see that if you were building an app, you’d want it to be used in other countries beyond North America, and specifically in China and India.
Soon, you are going to see some of the top apps start in other countries and the American/Canadian market will be an afterthought. In fact it has already happened… WeChat was ‘Made in China’!
You need to go to the page… it’s interactive!
The Kentucky Virtual Library presents: How to do Research
(Click to open page)
I started my Pair-a-Dimes for Your Thoughts blog on Elgg, because a friend invited me there to try out this think called ‘Blogging’. Elgg moved to Eduspaces killing all of my back-links. Frustrating. Eduspaces was being bought out and so I had enough and moved my blog to DavidTruss.com. Once there, and while in China, I decided to move my little-used Posterous site to this address, as a place to easily upload photos of what I thought would be a daily hand-written journal. That didn’t last long.
But Posterous was nice and simple. Put a link to a video in an email, or email a photo, add a few comments in the body of the email, then put the title in the subject line, and even add some tags in brackets if you wanted. Then send the email… instant post.
But then Twitter bought Posterous. Instead of slick integration, like post a Twitter Thread or Storify… Twitter killed Posterous. Sad. Really Sad.
This is why I moved my blog to my own domain. This is why I suggest everyone do the same. Spend some hosting money, and claim your own part of the internet. Use wordpress, it’s free and you can even set up posting by email, although in the ipad/iphone app era, even that isn’t really needed.
I’ve lost archives of student blogs on Elgg, and also on Ning sites after they went from free to fee. I still have links to ‘retagr’ and ‘explode.us’ which were identity pages that are now defunct. But I’ve paid for DavidTruss.com until 2018, and I pay yearly or bi-yearly for web hosting and now I don’t have to worry about big company x buying out cool company y and making it go away because x and y don’t want to create happy formulas together.
Goodbye Posterous. You’ll be missed. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to tweet about this post.
