I am what I do

I have often found it difficult to distinguish between real life and working life. This may be an increasingly common experience as our lives become  inter-connected by technologies that allow us to join professional meetings from our domestic spaces and to conduct business from the train. For me, the personal requirements of working with people engage me in observing and working on my own learning in what feels to be quite a healthy way. The language and practices associated with professional accountability (without getting too Foucauldian about this) are blurring those boundaries across all professional practices, while trying to define them ever more tightly.

I recently left the University of Surrey, where I had been working with SCEPTrE . Being there and choosing to leave has been a huge part of exploring those personal / professional edges. When I begin working with this innovative group - learning for a complex world - the fuzzy intersections between work and life suffused the evaluation and research strategy. I thought it might be useful to make the journey publicly accessible in a blog - a web-based log about that work. So I started by tracking the personal dimension to the public face of my single job at Surrey. Now this space is becoming a more open-ended reflective space, mostly for myself but with invited others and the potential for serendipitous dropping in.

Maybe, now that I’m free of any single identity and role, I will start to promote the site more widely and find an audience for my thoughts out there somewhere. It’s a strange form of writing.