Exactly 17 years ago today. That was the day when I started this blog.

You can still read my very first post, which was originally on Blogger and then transferred to WordPress. I have written 2,194 posts since then, which I find hard to believe. But it’s true!

So I naturally had to go back and see what I wrote about in my first post. The theme was basically “blogs written by teens,” which came up in two different ways. The first was simply that I learned (about blogging) from my students, the kind of thing that happens more often than one might think. The second was about students’ taking needless risks in their own public writing. I wrote about my

concern that teenagers who publish something for the whole world to read (after all, it’s the World Wide Web) might regret it when they realize that not only their friends but also their teachers, their future employers, and even their parents can read what they wrote. It’s not a private diary, after all. Full names and photos in local papers are almost always there to celebrate achievements in athletics, drama, community service, and the like. They don’t expose a kid’s thoughts — which are barely edited, if at all — to any casual reader.

Could I have written that very paragraph today? Yes, of course, but today I would add “college admissions officers” to the list of those who might later read their posts.

Categories: Teaching & Learning, Technology