Eight Years Ago Today

I began this blog as a way to learn about blogs and blogging for instruction and scholarly interaction and outreach. My first post is here, on blogging and what it is and what it might be good for.

I began this blog using Blogger, which I quite liked, and still like, but thought I’d try using Radio, lured in part by the Categories option. Using Radio was pretty awful. The support was non existent, the only good documentation was written by a horribly treated user, and the Radio Mac UI was, I think, designed by someone who thought the Mac OS was Windows with prettier colors.

I moved to MovableType, and liked it much better, for a while, but then Six Apart got very odd about pricing, and the updates kept breaking previous templates, so I moved to WordPress, and created lisaspangenberg.com as a “professional” site. I’ve also slightly changed the purpose of this blog; IT began out of my interest in Instructional Technology. I’d been the Instructional Technology Coordinator at UCLA’s Humanities Division for several years, working with LMSs (WebCT) and having determined that WebCT and Blackboard were both hideously awful, I wanted to try using open source CMS and blogging systems instead because they tend to have decent UIs, community support, and they actually worked.

Since then, I’ve finished my Ph.D., I’ve used Blogger and LiveJournal and WordPress for teaching, and worked in a software production environment creating and managing the work flow for content-driven media-rich brain games for seniors. I’ve tech edited a stack of consumer Mac books, written several, and have been a volunteer moderator, sys admin and community manager for a very large and active writers’ forum (Absolute Write; if you write you should go there and look around). I’ve also been a paid blogger and writer  for a lot of different publishers and companies.

My scope for this blog has consequently changed. So has the title. IT has become IT: Technology, Language and Culture.

Thanks all you wonderful people writing about technology and language and culture and pedagogy, I’ve learned a lot from you. I’m looking forward to another eight years.