Here we are, with the first ever proper post on our new blog. I had no idea how difficult this would be! When we decided to set up this blog I had so many ideas of what I might like to say to you, and now my mind is blank. In that way I realise that it is a bit like an essay. You have ideas, then you lose them, then you get anxious about whether you can write it at all and then, being academically inclined, you do what I just did: you look something up.

So, I looked up ‘blog’ – I never knew that it is short for ‘web log’. That is the funny thing with words: we get so used to them that we forget where they came from. Of course, that is also the great thing about our language: we all have the chance to make up words as we go along and, as long as there is a good reason for the word and people find it useful in expressing what they want to say, we all adopt it. Words can die over time as well, and you would rightly be reluctant to put this year’s new words into your essays, but it is still good to know (in most cases!) that they are out there if you want them. I cannot imagine that you will ever see a selfy of me on the internet, and I am not sure this word will exist by 2020, but we shall see…

Once I had looked up ‘blog’ I naturally went on to look up ‘log’, and Wikipedia tells me that it is, amongst other things, ‘a daily record of personal experiences’. It also tells me that it is ‘an algorithm used in digital image processing’ and ‘Les Paul’s first solid-body electric guitar’ – what an amazing language we have. The internet being what it is, I could have linked through from either of those definitions to other pages, so I had to resist that temptation to get on with talking to you here. That is a dilemma you might have faced too: getting on with the essay when your research is taking you to all sorts of interesting – and completely irrelevant – places.

You might have noticed that I looked all of this up on Wikipedia but you have perhaps been told that this could be a problem. There are always scare stories about students who have no idea that Wikipedia is not always completely accurate (its very nature, being created by the world, for the world, makes this inevitable to some extent) and use it as if it were a printed encyclopedia of sure and certain facts. That is why some teachers and lecturers ask students to avoid it altogether, and this would be a safe bet, but on the other hand it does allow you to do what academics do all the time: find a source, read what it has to say and then check it against a handful of other sources to make sure it is reliable. Not bad practice for your life at university, maybe.

Now we both know what I should be aiming for in this blog and I do hope to bring you, week by week, a record of my personal experiences tempered with some insights into life as a lecturer at university; I will also share with you the things I see around me, the lives of university students.  What has happened here, in our first ever meeting, is just what tends to happen with the essay I referred to right at the outset. By the time you have done the research and tried to put it into order, and made some notes reflecting on what you now know, the thing is almost written. As Alexander would say, ‘Simples!’