One Month Later...

On starting a substack...

Somewhat on a whim, I started a substack a month ago. It came from a place of realizing that my (still active) blog, By Any Other Nerd, felt like it was becoming inundated with lots of AI and education content. That’s not entirely new for me to focus on different topics for an extended period of time on the blog.

But this felt different—I’ve been doing a lot of work in this area and wanting to have a space to share it, expand upon it, and invite others in for conversations. Also, in referring to my work, I wanted to make it easier for folks to find it collectively rather than just sifting through posts on generative AI as well as other random posts that I typically include there.

Appreciation

First off, I need to thank all the folks who signed up (and new folks that keep showing up) and appear to be reading and sharing it. I got to a few hundred readers in this first month pretty quickly and according to the stats, most seem to be active readers. So thank you folks for signing up and finding it interesting enough to keep opening up.

I also have a few folks that have substantially shared and gotten others to sign up for which I’m very grateful for. Shout out to Tracy N. who single-handedly is responsible for 50+ subscriptions to the the newsletter.

I also have paid subscribers which is amazing and for which I’m extremely grateful for. I did turn on the paid-subscription feature but did not expect to get as many paying readers as I have (also, to be clear, I’m not rolling in an abundance of paid-subscriptions but am honored that anyone would be willing to pay for this work directly).

Image created with DALLE-3 with prompt: “Image: a book cover that is filled with gears and tubes as if it was electronic, in an art deco style”

Content

I started and continue to want to make this space a lab for sharing what I’m doing and simple sense-making for readers. I’m definitely doing the former but not entirely the latter. I think I got closer to doing this with last week’s post on The Gaps to Fill in Supporting Faculty & Staff with Generative AI but I aspire to do more clearer breakdowns for folks about the possibilities.

Right now, I’m averaging two posts per week it appears. I hope to keep that up and I’m ideally working towards splitting those posts between what I’m thinking or doing (e.g. sharing a talk or my thinking on things) for one post and then sharing something more practical and solid; something folks can use.

I certainly don’t suffer from a range of ideas and topics to write with at least half a dozen and growing draft posts already in creation. Where I stumble is that sometimes those become bigger than I had anticipated and I need to find ways to not get so lost in trying to do all the things with a given post but keep it (as the title says) simplified.

I’m not new to starting something and slowly figuring out or evolving it—that’s literally what I’ve done with my blog and YouTube channel over the years. I think what I’m outlining here makes sense and hopefully, y’all will find it helpful in that regard too. Here’s hoping!

Thanks for reading!

AI+Edu=Simplified by Lance Eaton is licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International