Year-end review

What did I get done in the video/pod/blog world in 2020?

This year, I’d have to say that making podcast episodes and YouTube videos for an audience beyond my students overtook my blogging. Although I’ve been writing pretty steadily (nearly daily), a lot of that daily writing in Roam Research and then in Obsidian has been directed either at big projects like my OER textbooks, courses, or the Bemidji 125th Anniversary book. Shorter writing has been more often than not directed at pods and videos.

I made 103 podcast episodes, which you can find on my Pod page at Anchor, or Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. People in 6 countries listened, and my most popular episode was “Bella Ciao!”

I have 106 videos on my YouTube channel, and 177 subscribers (more than half gained in the last month). Eighteen videos have over a hundred views, the top five are over 500, and the best video on this channel is at nearly a thousand after three months. That’s small potatoes compared to YT stars, but I’m happy with that for a beginner.

In the last couple weeks of 2020, I’ve made a few more (they’re on the pod channel too, if you prefer to listen):

12/14/2020: My reaction to another zettelkasten article by Niklas Luhmann:

12/16/2020: A description of how I use private groups for social annotation in Hypothesis in my classes:

12/22/2020: I speculated a bit about how I might use Obsidian to create an OER “textbook” for my History surveys:

12/24/2020: I showed how I’m making and filling “Empty Notes” in Obsidian:

12/31/2020: And the final video for the year is about how I make annotatable PDFs for myself and my students: