In his book, Lifelong Kindergarten author Mitch Resnick promotes the value of making thinking visible. He focuses on the importance of generating products, primarily the wide variety of products that can be generated within the Scratch programming environment.
This has been a perspective I have tried to adopt for years. I started blogging and posting web content in the late 1990s. I called the site offering my content learningaloud because the title had an ambiguous meaning when heard and because it allowed me to explain what I was learning from my study of educational psychology and educational technology. My multi-decade journey has included more topics than one might imagine. At one point, I functioned as a webmaster for the educational efforts of Game and Fish in North Dakota mostly trying to support schools that adopted the department’s OWLS (outdoor wildlife learning sites) project. Later, I began sharing tutorials and commentary for future educators in support of my wife and my educational technology textbooks for future teachers. This has been an ongoing process now for approximately 20 years. More recently I felt the need to use Facebook to comment on the state of U.S. politics. Over this entire span of online activity, this was the first time I felt the need to discuss my political opinions so my motivation for becoming more openly political is likely obvious.
I endorse the process of externalization (making thinking visible) no matter your age or purpose. Producing a product is a great way to clarify your own thinking and to engage others. I pay for the server space I use for most of my writing projects, but a service such as Blogger or Facebook is available to anyone. I now write as a nearly 70-year old individual in his retirement years, but the processes of reading, thinking and writing are important for all.
If there is a project others outside of education might find interesting, it would probably be the writing I have done while traveling. My wife and I have had the opportunity to travel the world and I have tried to provide commentary to share these experiences.
My earliest efforts were included in a blog I call Curmudgeon Speaks (posts from travels in Russia), but in recent years I have used blogger to provide descriptions and images of the trips we have taken in retirement.