bigmagpie

Back to School

Been a while since I thought much about writing in my own blog, although I am thinking a lot about blogs in general. Since we got back from holiday (which was nice, but now I have guilt about not getting down to uploading my photos to Flickr and learning how it all works) I've been thinking more about getting my dissertation research underway. The plan was of course to have gotten the first draft of the novel out of the way, but ho hum, it didn't work out like that.

So tomorrow I'm off to the first school I'll be working on blogs with. The teacher I'll be working with there only has time for a forty minute meeting in her lunch-hour, but hopefully in that time we can make sure we have access to blogger through the school's security net, identify the group of pupils we want to work with, identify key points in the scheme of work we feel will be suitable for self-reflection, and discuss how far we want to structure their critiquing of each other's work. As it's Yr 7, we'll probably want to give them a framework or language of some kind to work with.

Of course we can bash out some of these details by thinking aloud on the blog I've set up, but for some reason Blogger just doesn't seem to want to send out the team blog invites so at the moment Claire can only comment on my posts, not add posts herself. Don't know what I'm doing wrong really.

Hatching a Big Magpie

I made a decision today to streamline Big Magpie and make it just a blog. The whole site, on its conception, was to be a big book review site, archiving my reading of both young adult and regular fiction, as well as non-fiction and web-based stuff. But I've decided to call a halt to that for a while, for some good reasons.

One of the reasons is how much stuff I'm juggling at the moment. The un-named novel is still progressing, though I've hit up against a block in that my research has run out (I need a crash course in 17th Century engineering). But I'm still intending to have a first draft of that finished by the end of October. And then of course, after that comes the re-write.

I've also submitted my Masters dissertation proposal today, or at least step one of the proposal process. So from now until the New Year I'll be doing an online research and study skills module to prepare for the action research.

And then after that, of course, will come the action research. And I'm also working full time. So it seemed Big Magpie the book review website was never going to take off again.

But just playing around with Typepad tonight, I've realised that since I hatched the Big Magpie idea, weblog technology has kind of taken over what I wanted my site to do. I can keep track through the categories here of my informal reviews of what I've been reading, and even publish lists of my recent reads. It's a whole lot tidier and less formal than the elaborate site I had in mind a couple of years ago.

So Big Magpie is reborn. Here's hoping it will be a noisy and cheeky little devil.