It’s been a very long time (208 days according to my to-do list) since I’ve had the chance to post anything here.
Let me tell you about it.
There have been two unrelated changes that got in the way of me posting anything new on here for the past seven months or so. One is the fact that I changed hosts over the summer. I’d had a good run with JaguarPC.com, but the time had come to switch to a new host. I settled on DreamHost.com, and over the course of a week or two managed to get most of my websites transferred over to the Virtual Private Server there. This WordPress-based blog, however, requires a MySQL database, and although I’d done a good job of archiving everything from the old server, I had to do a bit of futzing around to get it all up and running on the new server. Not a lot of futzing, but a little, and it took me this long to get around to taking care of that.
“Software. Am I right?”
The second reason I haven’t posted is that I’ve been going through the existential struggle associated with the “mission creep” of this site. The Hybrid Classroom blog was initiated when I was a Physics teacher using some amount of Internet-based technology in the classroom. My teaching role at my school has changed significantly over the past few years, and now I spend the majority of my time in Computer Science classes. I’m pleased with this transition—I’ve always enjoyed teaching computer science, and it brings with it a unique set of joys and challenges—but I find myself wanting to write less about Educational Technology and more about Technology Education. The name of this site no longer reflects my primary interests… and I guess I’m just going to have to be okay with that.
It did briefly occur to me that I could start the site up with a new name, but I’d have to get a new name, and transfer posts over, or just let them rot on this site, and none of that appealed to me. So we’re just going to go with Hybrid Classroom and let people be a little confused about that.
I haven’t been completely absent from the Internet during the time this blog has been languishing. I have lots of things to share with you; we have some catching up to do.
One other thing I’m doing is taking down many of the old sites that I used to link to. Most of those related to Educational Technology, and to be honest, I don’t regularly read most of those sites any more. I have a new set of blogs that I rely on for Computer Science Education inspirations.
Oh, and comments are on again! I’m looking forward to some great conversations with you.