This is my miscellany blog — a place where I can keep a record of some of the things that I’m working on and that have caught my attention.

I spend a lot of time here thinking through issues concerning the development of theory in communication and the changing mediascape through which our communication is increasingly affected. Some of that thinking also relates to the ways in which ‘technology’ is, and could be, harnessed for teaching and learning in higher education – issues that I have been exploring for a number of years.

In my first blog post, written in the summer of 2005. I said:

This is something I’ve been playing around with in the last couple of weeks. It’s the idea of harnessing the ease of self-publishing on the web through ‘blogs’ as a way of creating a community of learners.

No more need of scare quotes now! That blog, mmu|spaces, was designed to supplement teaching materials for a third year research methods course on an undergraduate degree in communication. Its categories soon expanded to include resources and news for students on other courses in the programme. In 2007 one of those categories spurned its own blog – cultural identity. The limitations of WebCT (the VLE used at mmu) encouraged me to explore more open, flexible and collaborative environments. I suspected that the blog could provide one such environment. Weekly resources, postings (including guest posts), together with various experiments integrating third party services (links, videos, polls etc.) were successful and the course proved popular. The research methods course took a similar direction in 2008 with Independent Study, a blog which again took advantage of static pages to deliver workshop resources, dynamic posts for news, and links to include the students’ own blogs, developed as part of a requirement to keep reflective research diaries. My more personal blog, ‘notes towards’, began life in 2008 as a scratchpad.

These initiatives all pushed my exploration of blogs towards course/resource management and networked learning through rss feeds and aggregation. Creaking with some of the limitations of a hosted blog and excited at the possibilities afforded by greater control and use of plugins, in February 2009 I opted to start my own WordPress installation hosted by PAC webhosting. Posts from the previous incarnation of notes towards … have been imported into what is now clivemcgoun.net.