A Storify scrapbook of photographs, video and audio that I created in 2011.

As we hurtle towards 2012, I have a lot to be thankful for. I began the year looking for a job and started this blog pretty much as a shop-front for my work. After a lot of soul-searching, I came to the conclusion that I wanted to move out of newspapers and back into the first love of my life: higher education, and I was thrilled to have the chance to return to my...

  Ever since my teenage years, photography has held a big fascination for me. This has largely been down to the influence of my father, who was a keen photographer, and who freely passed on photographic tips to me, especially while on family holidays in picturesque places. I remember dad’s patient attempts to get me to understand the relationship between...

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what benefits overseas social networks might be to universities, especially those parts of the university dedicated to alumni communications. So I got reading to find out what was out there, and came across Chinese micro-blogging platform Weibo.com, which is often referred to as China’s equivalent to Twitter. The...

Just lately we’ve been enjoying BBC4′s documentary series Time to Remember, looking at the development of British Pathé. This reminded me that my father had made a lot of cine films in the 1960s, and thanks to the kindness of a family friend, I was able to get a DVD copy of five or six of his films. Because my father worked in TV, he’d wanted to...

It’s been busy on the writing front, which is great, but this hasn’t left much room for photography. I’ve got lots of ideas, but in the meantime, I was glad to grab a couple of hours yesterday taking some snapshots of the Lichfield Festival Pig Auction. These 30 fibreglass pigs (funded by Festival sponsor Packington Pork) have been...

This article first appeared on the University of Warwick’s Why Blog? page. I began blogging in 2008, when I was working as a print journalist. I started out for several reasons: partly because I didn’t want to get left behind with the digital publishing revolution, partly because I wanted to indulge myself in a forum that wasn’t controlled by others, and...