Lisa Wise’s Web home

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Elearning and web stuff

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Taekwondo

My taekwondo blog posts first began in 2002 on MoveableType to chronicle my experience of learning a martial art with my then 9 year old son. Little did I think that I would still be practising taekwondo almost 20 years later, and currently preparing for my Vth Dan grading! My early posts were just my experience of taekwondo as a martial arts outsider. For quite a long period of time, I have not been comfortable discussing my taekwondo experience online as so much of martial arts and sport involves politics, power and money in a very hierarchical and often testosterone-fuelled environment. At this point in my life, after 15 years of actively instructing a martial art, I am only interested in the practice of the art and its role in people’s personal development.

A Word on Categories

I started using WordPress in 2005 for my blog without much consideration of the difference between a category and a tag. In fact, I didn’t really know what a tag was, and why a tag cloud might ever be any more useful than a set of categories. And because categories present themselves in a list to select from in WordPress, they seemed like a better way to be organised. Of course that was then, and this is now and over time, my understanding of what goes with what has evolved. The thing about categories is that they are stable and hierarchical and if you change one, you really need to restructure everything. The thing about tags is that they sort themselves and as time goes by, they paint their own picture of how you think about things just in terms of how centrally a tag stands out. I haven’t decided whether to spend the time tagging all my posts or not, but it would probably be a worthwhile endeavour. And now, with a fresh start, the whole notion of categories might need to be rethought!