Well, I finally decided to put a link to my blog from my professional web site. I’d been laboring under the delusion that taking this step would send students flooding to my blog where they would read things like “Wow, I really dropped the ball on that class.” Surely you can understand why that might make me pause. But then I realized that students only visit my calendar page. They don’t care what committees I’m on, or the presentations I’ve given, or the papers I’ve written. So I buried the link at the very bottom of that boring page.
Which begs the question, why link at all if I put it in a place that nobody is likely to see? The short answer is, I don’t know. I guess now I can pretend to myself that I’m not hiding this little project from the people I work with every day. But really nothing has changed.
I know that when I am not quite sure about publicizing something, I tend to do something to hide it a bit. I feel like I put it out there, but didn’t make it too obvious. If everything works out ok, it is then easier to make it more prominent later on. I totally understand this strategy!
My blog got outed to my coworkers after I requested that we buy Walt Crawford’s Balanced Libraries for our library. Word spread that I was quoted – and now most know about the blog (and seem to read it too!).