Ever since I took on the role of “Blended Learning Fellow”, I have wanted to create a blog space, which provides a time line of developments in technology, and which is accessible to University of Winchester staff, advising them of what is going on in the e-learning world, providing them with access to useful resources and materials from training sessions. 
I started with “Blogger” as I thought it might be simpler to get people to engage, but as I am now teaching people how to use WordPress (and I’m more familiar with it), I have moved it to http://wblb.wordpress.com/.
WordPress.com or WordPress.org?
It’s tempting to move it to WordPress.org, for more functionality, but part of trying to encourage people to use the blogging software is to demonstrate what can be done for free…. so for now at least… As .com appears to be stripping out all my embedding code however, it’s a bit of a pain (I’ve just enclosed screenshots and links instead!)
Vision?
The intention is that others within the University, who are part of the Blended Learning Community of Practice, will be allocated access to WordPress and upload materials. A lot of material remains on the Learning Network (our VLE), and a Wiki will be created there for people to talk more freely about the successes and failures of projects, whilst the material that’s considered “publicly acceptable” will be on the public blog. Let’s see what happens…
This summer, I was the co-editor of Capture, and on the Editorial Board of Alfred, E-Journals at the University of Winchester. I undertook a number of interviews, re-edited those interviews into workable pieces for submission, re-edited a number of other pieces (including reducing 10,000 word Final Year Projects, to 3,000 word articles, without losing the essential meaning of those articles), and co-wrote an article on Web Accessibility for those with recorded disabilities. These journals have their official launch at the Learning and Teaching Development morning today.