After 5 years, 473 posts, almost 300 comments, and over 12,000 unique visitors from dozens of different countries in this calendar year alone, this blog is entering a new phase. It starts with a new name – welcome to ‘Learning at City‘.
The blog began as ‘Educational Vignettes’, launched as a WordPress site in 2011 by City’s Learning Development Centre. An early post was 45 words long and was about an online resource for staff and students called StudyWell, which focused on positive study and plagiarism prevention. This fusion of pedagogy and technology has largely driven the growth of the blog ever since, and it now counts over 60 registered authors. Many of these authors are still at City and we are now proud to include several academics from across the schools amongst them.
The blog has weathered a lot of change in the intervening five years, including a move from a standalone WordPress site to joining the rest of the family at City’s own blogging platform, as well as the combination of several teams to form the Department for Learning Enhancement and Development (LEaD). This academic year, several of us from across LEaD have been looking at how we can develop the blog to reflect the new wider departmental landscape that it is part of, and we are now ready to take the first step outdoors with what we’ve been doing.
In software terms, you could call this ‘Learning at City blog version 1.0’. Launching at the Learning at City 2016 conference, version 1.0 includes:
- a new name and URL
- a renewed focus on Categories, incorporated into an expanded top level menu
- a refreshed sidebar that also includes the latest activity from our Twitter channel
- revised ‘About‘ and ‘Guidance‘ pages
We will also be launching a regular writing group for new and established authors. This is set to include help and guidance for those new to blogging, and a social space for all authors to be able to focus on their writing. More information about this group will be published here soon.
To those that have written for us over the past five years but whose educational journey continues elsewhere, we extend our heartfelt thanks to you for your contributions here.
To those authors who are continuing to share innovation and good practice at City, our thanks go out to you too – we’re looking forward to your contributions here on the new platform.
To those readers who are still with us or who are new here, tell us what you think!
So, over to you. Any questions?
