Switching to Blogger

I've just switched from a hosted WordPress site to Blogger, for various reasons:

• I fancied trying a different platform
• Blogger seems to have got much better recently
• Alan knows best
• it's completely free (though not as flexible as WordPress but flexible enough for my needs)
• it's ad free (unlike the free version of WP)
• I'm also determined to make the most of Google Plus and Blogger seems to integrate much better
• Maybe the novelty of a new platform will get me back into the blogging habit

I need to figure out the gadgets and the table function is poor (non-existent) but it's clean and crisp and simple. I'm looking forward to making the most of it. I haven't yet decided whether to redirect my old site - just exported the old stuff from WP then imported to Blogger (which was very straightforward - though I might do some tidying up later)

Draft social media guidelines for UoL

On Thursday last week Alan, Brendan, Emma, Richard and Michelle had a really useful meeting with our Marketing and Communications team to  talk about blogs, blogging and branding at the University of Leicester. We talked mostly about institutional blogs but also about staff blogs and all agreed that Wordpress was the platform of choice. I mentioned that Joss Winn, at the University of Lincoln, had set up http://blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/

Your chance to contribute

At the end we also touched on the draft social media policy that Marketing and Communications are working on. Helen's kindly given me permission to put the policy on digress.it so people can comment on it (at the paragraph level). So here's the link to the draft policy on digress.it for you to comment on. Thanks to Marketing and Communications for letting us comment on the policy in this way. I hope that it proves to be a really useful way of developing policy.

By  Matt Hamm

A year of blogging

It's been just over a year since Alan Cann finally persuaded me to start a blog (I was worried I didn't have anything to say). My first post was on 3 April 2009 on Developing online tutorials at Teaching and Assessment Network. It was a slow start but in the last few months I've been beginning to find blogging really useful. If you look at the archives for this blog you'll see that they extend back to January 2009 - that's because I tried to start with a team blog for Student Development, but it didn't work - but I've imported my posts from then for completeness.

Alan (him again) put it very well last week in a post of his last week re his thoughts on blogging.

To be perfectly honest with you, the main reason I write this blog is so that I can find things again. Now, I have lots of ways of finding things, such as Google, social search and all the tags on my delicious account, but they don't help very much when you can't remember what you're looking for. Writing about things lodges them in my brain so that's less likely to happen. It also changes what I decide I need to know. Along the way, I've found that some of the stuff I write is of interest to other people. Which is nice.

I don't look at the stats for the blog very often but I guess I should make it at least an annual event, so here are the top posts of all time on my blog (cue relevant music).

The Remembering the milk post is largely because James Clay retweeted it at ALTC2009 (thanks James!). I'm pleased to see one of the Tagginganna posts up there, Advice from Helpdesk Hollie, and of course (who could forget) the-practically-went-viral Brown cake.

Using blogs in teaching

Super helpful 'video poster' from Lindsay Jordon on using blogs in teaching.