I’ve been thinking for some time that I really ought to write an article every so often about blogs I like reading, or that have recently sprung up or come to my attention. I thought I’d get the ball rolling with “nhowie: Musing mainly about ICT in K-12 education”.

Neil HowieNeil teaches in Serbia, and has written for this website and its accompanying newsletter over the years, as a search will reveal. Neil emailed recently to tell me that he’d restarted his blog. I thought I’d take a look, not only because Neil has always come through as far as contributing good articles is concerned, but because he mentions me in one of his posts, thereby indicating that he is a man of great perspicacity and intelligence.

I quite like the articles Neil has posted so far, for two main reasons:

Neil's blog's masthead

First, he writes from the perspective of a practising teacher. Although ex-teachers like myself have not necessarily completely lost touch with what it’s like at the proverbial chalkface, you really do need teachers to tell it how it is, otherwise we’ll all be at the mercy of so-called visionaries and their often half-baked and ill-thought out ideas.  Perhaps I should have included that in my article entitled 7 Reasons educators should blog.

Second, Neil seems to have discovered some pretty useful links, some of which I haven’t encountered before. I especially like Why I use Twitter… – and not just because he mentions me in it! It’s full of useful links, so much so that I’ve included a reference to it in the “Further Resources” handout I’ve prepared for a course on assessment that I’m running.

So far, Neil has managed to more or less keep the posts coming. I say “more or less” because there has been a gap of a few days. I can’t complain because, unusually, I didn’t manage to update my own blog for almost a week. But as many will attest, it’s easy to start a blog, less easy to maintain the momentum. Given Neil’s predilection for posting useful reflections and links, I hope you will agree that it is a matter of enlightened self-interest for us to put his new blog on our “must-read” list. Here's the URL: nhowie.