When I first started my doctoral program, I was told that I needed a website.
It should include my CV, a list of publications, and possibly a brief bio. That was the whole pitch. A tidy little online résumé that could sit quietly in a corner of the web.
And for a while, that’s exactly what it was. Static. Performative. Dead.
But I couldn’t shake a question:
Why don’t we use these spaces to share what we’re actually learning? Before, between, and beyond publication?
Why not post the messy in-progress ideas, the half-formed questions, the data that never makes it into journals? Why not think out loud?
Learning Out Loud
So, I turned my static website into a blog.
I started writing about what I was learning and why it mattered. I reached out to others who were doing similar work and stumbled upon open online spaces, such as the Connected Learning MOOC and the Mozilla Webmaker community.
That was a turning point.
Blogging wasn’t about broadcasting anymore. It was about documenting. It became a space to learn in public, to make my thinking visible, and to see how others were connecting the dots in their own work.
I started sharing experiments, and soon others followed along, remixing and responding. The feedback loop wasn’t just academic. It was human. I wasn’t just presenting ideas; I was joining a conversation.
But not everyone saw it that way.
Some colleagues in my field dismissed what I was doing, labeling me and others as “mindless bloggers.” A few even asked why I didn’t just take one “good idea” and turn that into a job, a line of research, and eventually, tenure.
Others questioned why I was spending time on things that didn’t “count,” such as webinars, podcasts, social media threads, and, yes, blog posts. To them, these weren’t legitimate forms of scholarship because they didn’t map neatly onto traditional impact metrics.
But for me, that was exactly the point. I wasn’t chasing metrics. I was chasing meaning.
I wanted to think openly, to experiment, and to learn out loud. Even if it didn’t fit inside the boxes we’d built around academic work.
The One Constant is Change
As I moved between universities, projects, and communities, I kept coming back to one phrase I’d share with my students and colleagues:
“The one constant is change.”
Teaching, writing, technology. It all evolves faster than we expect.
So, I started to see my website and blog as a living archive of change. A place where people could meet me at one moment (say, through a post on web literacy), and then trace the breadcrumbs to see how that idea connected to something else (digital badges, coding, reading comprehension, even recipes for cold brew coffee).
Each post was a breadcrumb, part of a much larger trail.
From Blog to Newsletter
Eventually, I realized I needed a rhythm. A way to intentionally connect the dots.
That became my newsletter.
The newsletter wasn’t just about updates or links. It was a structured reflection. A regular practice of asking, What’s happening right now in technology, education, and literacy, and what does it mean?
Writing the newsletter helped me slow down. It made me curate, rather than accumulate. It also gave me a clearer sense of the audience. Not the entire internet, but a small circle of curious peers following along. What did I see as the need to know, and not just the nice-to-know? I later fleshed this out as online content curation in my research and teaching.
Scattered Selves, Scattered Spaces
Then came the realization that everything I’d built was scattered.
I had:
- A main WordPress site
- Several abandoned Wikispaces and Blogger sites
- Google Drive directories full of teaching materials and research notes
- PDFs of publications
- PowerPoints from conferences
- A podcast
- Bookmarks in Pinboard
- Notes in Evernote, Notion, and who-knows-where
I had created a distributed identity , but it wasn’t federated. It was fragmented.
Don’t get me started on what I left behind and lost in old NINGs, websites, and failed hard drives from past jobs, including Google Drives.
Rewilding the Second Brain
So, I started to pull the threads together.
I wanted one place where my notes , newsletter , and public work could coexist. Not as separate silos, but as parts of the same ecosystem.
That led me to Obsidian and plain text Markdown. I didn’t want my ideas to be trapped on proprietary platforms. I wanted portability, longevity, and the freedom to move across devices and contexts.
I began thinking of my digital presence as a garden, rather than a showcase. Something that grows, composts, and evolves. A place where ideas cross-pollinate.
And that’s how my work on “federating my second brain” began. Building a connected, open, and evolving network of notes that could feed both my own thinking and the communities I care about.
A Living Web
At this point, my site has evolved into more of a personal wiki than a traditional blog. It houses my thinking in motion. Everything from scholarly writing to working notes and half-baked reflections.
It’s messy. It’s nonlinear. But it’s alive.
And that’s the point.
Rewilding your digital identity isn’t about control. It’s about cultivating conditions where ideas can grow wild again.