Moving on…

I think the key to having a blog is being prepared to deal with the question “Are you OK? I’ve been watching your blog and you’ve stopped writing.”

I have no objection to living this side of my working life in public. In some ways it’s reassuring to know that there is a safety-net of people out there concerned enough to ask how the author is doing… thank you
So, where have I been… well, I’ve been ill, Jo’s been ill… the whole of the UK is ill at the moment it seems… a lot of people asking me where I’ve been have also been ill… That’s a part of it, but it’s not really the only reason.

Here’s the core of it… i can’t write unless I’ve got acres of silence around me and the guarantee of knowing that I’m not going to be disturbed…

And, you know, I can’t do that at the university… unless I can develop superhuman concentration powers that allow me to just switch off the outside world…

I’ve tried various things… I’ve tried the ‘once a week’ rule where you do something if it only comes up once a week… which went to the ‘once a month’ rule and then the ‘once a year’ rule… there’s still too much stuff going on… I just can’t do it… Eventually, I’ve had to bite the bullet and cut myself off… and I’m now working at home.

The fact that I’m writing again here shows that it’s actually worked… I’ve got more done in the last three days that I did in the rest of the month!

But, where does this leave my other responsibilities; to be part of a living thriving community of academics either in Deaf Studies, or in Geography?

I guess the real answer to that is “I don’t know”… but what I do know is that there’s no set mould for this, and having tried pretty much everything else, I have had to admit that if I want to get the PhD finished before the end of the year, then this is what I have to do.

The scary thing is that I’m enjoying it!

Day 1… it all starts here

OK… so, following our introduction to participatory media day yesterday run by David Brake http://blog.org and Sam Kinsley (PhD at Bristol), I am going to run this as an experiment. Why wordpress? well, it’s plain, boring and free… oo… and it’s been around for long enough to be tied into all the different search engines, tagging systems and everything else that we were told we might need.

So, what am I going to do with it? Well, over the next year, I write a PhD… from scratch… and it needs to be sumitted by next Christmas, so with a bit of luck you’ll be able to follow that process.

Also… I’ve been looking for blogs run by either academics interested in Deaf studies and/or by Utopianists… and found nearly nothing. So, this is a first step in getting some of that information out there, and some of my thinking in this area into the public domain.

And, with my wedding to the lovely Jo coming up later this year too (1st Sept) it’s a good place to introduce myself. If what they said yesterday – about this being one of the future directions for research and communication – is true, then it wouldn’t hurt to have information about me on it so that you can see who I am. Of course, that forms a necessary background to my work too (for those of you interested in the Deaf field, I’m hearing, so there’s a particular need to be transparent on my identity and community belonging)  so it’s a necessary addition to the professional and academic work.

So, watch this space for all this and possibly more. This blog should be video enabled too so as soon as get a chance I’ll introduce myself with a Vblog entry so you can see me too.