Here’s to 17 Years on the bava….

…and all the irreparable joy it has brought me!

We were chatting about blogging in the Reclaim Edtech meeting on Wednesday when it occurred to me that I missed bavatuesdays’ 17th orbit around the web. December 13th is this blog’s birthday. Seventeen gott damned years!  I’m not sure I’ve done t0o many other things as consistently and for as long as I’ve blogged. There has been a post at least once a month, every month since December 2005. By year’s end I’ll hit my 3700th blog post, and have over 16,000 comments.

There’s some serious mileage on this site, and I have said it before and I’ll say it again, I pretty much owe any pathetic semblance of a career I have mustered in the last 20 years to this space. That’s why I remain a true believer in the open web; I have experienced its power in my own work. Continually sowing ideas like seeds on this site, working tirelessly to help them germinate, and then sharing the fruit with those who would bite from the bava apple.

The bava.blog continues to be a happy home for sharing thoughts, championing the work of others, and documenting all the things I would otherwise forget. In many ways blogging is a quotidian affair: they’re often not big ideas and many are arguably forgettable, but the habit of reflecting regularly by writing has been transformative. And for me the blog has always represented a liberation from academic writing—a prison house of language I had been stuck in for almost a decade during grad school. If you think my writing is bad now, you should have read my grad school papers 🙂

I still struggle with some of the basics of writing, and I think part of what attracts me to it is that it’s always been so damn hard for me. I’ve learned that if I continue to try and cobble together a sentence that captures an experience or idea sooner or later one will hit. There are certainly more pricks than kicks, but it’s all worth it when I am able to bring forth one cogent thought that resonates with a couple of other people, it’s a deep reminder of how hard we have to psychically work to try and connect with one another—and I’m not interested in trading that for the tempting convenience of offloading the work. In many ways it’s all we have.

But there I go philosophizing  again. The simple point is this blog has been very, very good to me. The least I can do is write a post every twelve months to remind myself that the scribblings in this virtual notebook are a kind of small life’s work that is prosaic enough to be easily forgotten, but remarkable enough to potentially intersect—however briefly—with another life’s vector. There’s a magic in that banality that I don’t ever want to take for granted.

Why blog? Because there is faith in a seed. #4life

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7 Responses to Here’s to 17 Years on the bava….

  1. Brian says:

    This space was how I first got to know you, and it’s been a source of enlightenment, amusement and occasional abuse for me ever since. Glad you are still at it, pal.

    • Reverend says:

      And your early support and friendship was why I continued then and still do it now. You are the vector to my point 🙂

    • Wow, 17 years. I’ve been reading the Bava for almost that long too. Definitely at least since spring 2007 where I have a distinct memory of reading your blog instead of paying attention to a lecture in a certain class.
      I keep coming back to how important it was for me in my college years to experience so many minds through their writings. Blogs were often a space where I got to see people wrestle with thoughts and go back and forth in ways that spaces like Twitter could never match up to.
      Cheers to the Bava!

      • Jim Groom says:

        Cheers to the Hauser! Thanks for the commenting, and thanks for reading for all those years. It’s interesting how much the spaces we moved to for convenience in many ways not only remove the complexity of posting, but also of the ideas you post about. I do enjoy minimalism to a degree, but how do you struggle with ideas so publicly on a platform defined by followers and audiences rather than a community of thought and practice. I don’t know if folks will return to the blog, but this hippie has never left. The water is warm, Caravanista!

  2. Alan Levine says:

    The bava is almost an adult now. Keep that blogging light on, I count in it regularly in my feed reader.

    The heck with writing aesthetics the posts are the genuine kind of presence that gets more rarer with each click tick.

    Maybe you might want to look into a newer theme? 😉 Nahhhhhh.
    Keep on blogging on.

    • Reverend says:

      And can always count on the Dog for a bone or two! Long live the blog, even if there are only two left on the edtech blogosphere, we’ll be churning out the hits 🙂

      Luckily it’s so fun and I still love it, the gravy would be if more folks did it cause sometimes I miss the linkback love 🙂

      See you on the blog in 2023!

  3. Wonderful! Thanks for writing. I’ve enjoyed reading your blog posts this year.

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