One of the challenges of the last few months has been to develop a ten credit unit of study with the title ‘Social Change and Late Modernity’. With unit specifications in official documents suitably vague there’s been room for a personal imprint – exactly which has been worrying me for at least six months. The options were:

1. Translate my own specific areas of research and interest into an emphasis on social change from a communicative and media perspective. The downside of this is how relevant that perspective would be to students who have not followed a  specific ‘communcations’ route through the degree programme.
2. Continue a thematic social change curriculum choosing those topics which seem (to me) most relevant to students graduating in Social Change this year. The downside here is that in 10 sessions what would I be able to cover, with which theoretical/conceptual framework and more importantly what would, necessarily, be omitted?
3. Create something new which could be a summation unit – the final unit of a three year degree that pulls together threads both personal and academic.

I decided on the third and have now developed a unit which examines contemporary ethical issues relating to the disciplinary fields (social policy, social & community studies, and policy & management) to investigate the interactions of social problems, justice and well-being. Social problems here are defined as problematic questions which require social debate – not with social conditions, the construction of social conditions or those groups affected – which have been covered in various other units on the programme.

So, with roots in moral philosophy and water from reasoned public debate we started planting yesterday. With spring just around the corner …

A new blog hosts the resources for the unit at:

http://socialchange.clivemcgoun.net

Using multiple toolbars on Firefox can be tempting but it’s always worthwhile checking how much you use these and whether they are crowding out your screen space or actually saving time and making your reading/searching more effective. At the moment I’ve got Diigo, Zotero, and Athens toolbars plus Firefox bookmarks toolbar. This last is the one that I use to store all those websites I return to again and again – Facebook, Amazon, Google Docs, Google Reader, Kwout etc. They’re sitting right there so I can access them quickly and easily at a click of the mouse.

Here’s one little tool that I think could sit very comfortably on your Firefox toolbar. Readability is what is know as a bookmarklet – a little bit of code inscribed in a button. What readability does is remove any extraneous materials (adverts, links, navigation) from an article you are reading. Here’s an example:

To read this article without all the extraneous stuff, I simply click the Readability button and I get:

This is now much easier for me to read and digest.

Check out the Readability website for instruction on how to instal.

I know that some of you have been struggling to populate your Google Readers with relevant/appropriate subscriptions. To give you a hand – and to encourage you to look at and think about digital photography – here’s a bundle of blogs that explore digital photography.

Subscribe. Browse. Delete subscriptions that you don’t like or don’t read. Add any others that you come across (remember to share them) that you think are interesting. I’ll be offering you more bundles as we progress through the year.

Hit the subscribe button below and you’ll be taken to Google Reader where you hit subscribe once again and – voila – subscriptions to those blogs will be added to your Reader in their own folder.

In order to streamline the process of organising tutorial times (and avoid the interminable email exchanges this often creates) I am experimenting with an online scheduling system. This allows you to see when I am available and to book tutorial time with me. My availability is updated weekly with a week in advance.

View my calendar and arrange a tutorial

There’s something about Autumn tramping through Tatton Park in Cheshire. This is a regular haunt in November when the stags amongst the 400 Red and Fallow deer in the parkland roar, strut around in parallel walks, and try to avoid being left out of the party.

They’re difficult to see on a Sunday when the 1000 acre park feels strangely crowded. But here’s a view of some stags, and more of the amazing colours of the woodland in a moment of sunlight.