The photo for this post is a pic of our lovely greyhound who came to live with us 10 years ago. Sadly, she died this week (at the grand old age of 16). We all loved her and will miss her a lot. 

I was reading a post by Martin Weller the other day who was celebrating 10 years of Edtechie which really resonated with me, a fellow sufferer of imposter syndrome. It made me wonder how long I had been blogging and I was surprised to find that I have also been blogging for 10 years.

It made me revisit some of my early posts which were sometimes quite raw. My first post beginnings was about flickr and how it had really transformed my life back then. This was a time when I was working for Jisc and travelling around the country, whilst at home in Glasgow our family was struggling to work out how to manage challenges faced at school by my autistic son. It was a tough period in our lives and blogging and flickr gave me a creative outlet and focus. It was cathartic and enabled me to connect with others going through similar things. It allowed me to add our voices to the blossoming community of online non-professionals who often had much more knowledge and expertise of autism than the professionals we dealt with daily.

These technologies offered a lifeline to isolated families struggling to survive. They mean a lot to me. I have less need to do this now as there are many more blogs with information and awareness raising writing. My son has become more private as he has got older so I don’t write about his experience anymore.

I have also used the blog to talk about my work in educational technology and I have often struggled to maintain the principle of mixing up my separate worlds. In 2011 I wrote this in a post about digital identity

“This blog was one attempt to bring together all my separate identities – although it’s a big cheat because I chose this site because I can categorise and tag to my hearts content so really it’s just a load of separate selves lumped in together. Do my work colleagues really want to read this ramble. Do they want to read about autism and home learning. Probably not. So not sure this works that well and sometimes it does stop me posting things – like rants – like this.”

This still rings true and I did have a long period of time when I felt unable to write about either. But I would like to continue this experiment so I intend to write more of a mixture of posts.  I have several other websites now and maybe I could write more personal stuff on these and keep this for work but this has always been my personal and professional blog.

For me – learning, autism and digital identity are both personal and professional.

So happy 10th birthday to my messy mixed up blog and here’s to many more posts….

My other websites focus on other aspects of my work:

Lou Mcgill Creative work – art, photography, writing
Your Digital Story – Digital storytelling, web design and marketing for small businesses
Life’s Little Ironies – Art gallery