After about 10 years of working in the software industry, I am easing back into working primarily in education (I am a secondary mathematics and computer science teacher). I'm working as an occasional teacher, teaching online, and doing other education-related work.
In some ways I've never left education - I have taken on a few curriculum writing contracts, have led some workshops, but mostly I have stayed involved with teaching by hanging on the periphery of online education communities.
When I left teaching, I still found myself thinking about math - math done for fun and education, so I started a blog mathrecreation to share the math I did for fun, and a twitter handle @mathrecreation to follow mathematics practitioners and educators. My social media presence has been somewhat anti-social: as someone on the periphery of education doing other work, I didn't insert myself into education-related discussions. My posting also was not focused on education in the strong sense - mostly on sharing what interested me, which occasionally included things that might be of interest to educators. Although on the outside, and somewhat anti-social, I have still made some great connections with other educators and enthusiasts, and this has helped me keep the education-side of my life alive.
Part of my re-entry into education is taking courses about education - I hope to use this blog and a new twitter handle (@danmackinnon7) for posts that are related to coursework and other aspects of my education journey, and keep my "math recreation" posting on mathrecreation.
How blog?
While beginning to look at resources for one of my courses, EDU5287 at UOttawa, I was reflecting on how I currently create digital learning resources, and how I engage with online communities of educators and enthusiasts.
I have started publishing the code that I write on Githhub. This is for convenience - I use Git as part of development and like having access to code anywhere, but it also has connected me to others that share similar interests - a social side effect that I was not looking for, but is nice. Most of the code I write is related to my recreational mathematics interests, or related to learning new (to me) technologies. My Github repositories are at github.com/dmackinnon1, and my Github pages are at dmackinnon1.github.io. Although Github is not primarily associated with education, I am interested in looking into how it can be used as a platform for publishing online learning resources.
Whether it is about a piece of math-related code I have written or some other topic, I use the Blogger platform to post. My blog is hosted at www.mathrecreation.com.
A long while ago, I used Google Reader to keep track of articles about math and math-education. Unfortunately that service ended, and I switched to keeping interesting links on a Tumblr blog, mathrec-links.tumblr.com.
Many of my recreational mathematics interests are in the area of geometry, and sometimes generative geometric art. I share math-inspired images that I create using code or software packages on another Tumblr blog, mathrecpics.tumblr.com.
The Blogger and Tumblr blogs automatically publish tweets to the Twitter handle @mathrecreation. Most of my tweets there are automatically published - I don't generally tweet about opinions or personal things.
I'm not quite sure how I will use this new blog and twitter handle... we'll see how it evolves. :)
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