Our Journey, Day 87
Day 87, 181 to go. It’s coming up on ninety days since I was informed I’ll be losing my job at Bemidji State. We’ve had a change of seasons here. It has snowed a bit and the temp will be staying below freezing today. I'm running the pellet stove in my office. That does a bit more to impress on me that time is passing, I guess. It will be Spring and the snow will be gone, although the lilacs might not quite be blooming, when I wrap up my final semester at BSU.
I’ve been thinking a bit more about my courses and whether there’s content in them that people would be attracted to, if they weren’t doing it for a grade and a General Education requirement. I suspect there’s more YouTube interest in weird details of history that people didn’t know, that calls the ”Master Narrative” into question. As controversial as it was, the “Knowing Better” Neoslavery video got a lot of views (4.4 million). Even my reaction to it got a lot of views. I think there are several items like that in my approach to world and US history. Do I want to make a bunch of videos where I wade into these controversies or even try to create them where they don’t yet exist?
I think a big part of this question will be resolved by what type of job I get next. If I end up doing Open Education work (there are several jobs I’m pursuing related to OER), then I may end up drifting away from the history content a bit. If I find an audience for it online, maybe I’ll pursue it. The issue is, you don’t know whether something is going to find viewers until you put it out there. And put it in a place where the people interested in that type of content are going to find it. I do have some readers who seem to like it, for example, when I post historiographical book reviews. I’m not sure whether these folks initially found me because I was doing history-related stuff, or note-making, or what. I’ve been a bit too scattered in my posting habits, I suspect. I occasionally get spam emails from people who say they're SEO (search engine optimization) experts and can help me find my audience. I have zero interest in turning this thing where I'm pursuing stuff that interests me into some type of sales job. If I wanted that, I'd go back into sales.
Hopefully, carving the note-making, reading, and writing content and putting it on Lifelong Learners will help people who are interested in that sort of thing find it more easily, as well as allowing me to focus more on history in MakingHistory. I’ll be continuing that cleanup and organization this weekend. With luck I’ll have a few new posts for each site. And I will get a bit more interested in communicating with others interested in the same sort of thing, where they already are. For example, when was the last time I dipped into the "Antinet" Reddit? And I haven't even looked at r/greatbooks yet!