Can Anybody Read This?

That’s the first question, I need to ask, to be honest. Because this is my first post on this blog, I have no idea if I’m posting in the right place, or if I’m doing it correctly, or if anyone will ever read the words that are flying out of my laptop right now…

…Let me back up. My name is Bryan Sweasy. I’m the Chief Information Officer for Erlanger-Elsmere School District, which is an independent school district in Northern Kentucky, about eight miles from downtown Cincinnati.

I’ve been keeping a blog of my own, http://sweasy.net, for almost exactly four years now. For most of those four years my blog was what I’d call a “personal” blog, which is a nice way of saying that it had no real focus. I used it as a tool to write about whatever I felt like writing about that day. Most of the time I wrote about my life and what was happening, things I was feeling, interactions I was having in my daily life, photos of posted signs I thought funny. Religious musings. Political stuff. Again…whatever I felt like writing. In addition to all of that, I also wrote the occasional piece about the Ed Tech world.

I gave that blog up a couple of months ago, though. My family confronted me one day and basically had an intervention with me, telling me that after almost four years they were tired of their lives being posted online for the world to see. They said they were tired of people they barely knew walking up to them and talking to them about very personal events in their lives that they didn’t know anyone else even knew about, but that I’d posted online. I couldn’t blame them for feeling the way they did, and after some soul searching I decided to stop posting to that blog and re-envision http://sweasy.net as an Ed Tech only site (That original site is still online at http://bsweasy.blogspot.com, and I guess–if you’re really interested in what my life was like between May of 2008 and February of 2012–you could go there and read about it). So I went post by post through the original blog and pulled out all of the posts that were about Ed Tech, and I created a new blog with just those posts in them, and on February 16 I made my first ORIGINAL post to the new, Ed-Tech only Sweasy.net blog.

About a week after that I got an email from Marty Park, who is the creator of this blog. Marty was an occasional reader of my old personal blog, and he told me that he’d seen the blog entry where I wasn’t going to write my personal blog anymore, and he was looking to get more contributors to his kyedtech.com blog, and would I be interested in authoring a few posts? I told him that I’d just started my new blog, and that I appreciated the offer, but I wanted to kind of do things on my own for a while, but that I’d keep his offer in mind.

Two months later, I’ve made my decision. I’m discontinuing my http://sweasy.net blog and going to write here. As soon as I finish this post I’m making one final post on my blog redirecting people here, and then I’m making all of my posts here.

Why the change? It’s not because of a lack of traffic to my new site. If anything, my blog traffic has increased since I switched to the all Ed Tech format. No, I made the switch mostly because, once I looked at what I was doing at Sweasy.net and compared it to what was happening at THIS blog, I saw some real similarities and thought, why not join the authors of this blog and create a single spot for those interested in Education Technology in Kentucky.

So starting with my NEXT post, that’s what I plan to do. For now, I just wanted to say hello, and waste a little bit of your time with a 700 word entry about–now that I go back and re-read it–not much.

And mostly, just find out if you can actually read it…