With apologies in advance for making an exceptionally obvious observation, but it has properly dawned on me this week that writing a blog might have significant advantages for teaching. A couple of days ago I was in class with a group of MSc students, talking about what we can learn from the study of service user trajectories. The sensible thing to do was to navigate to this site, and show people where they can download this recent paper. So that’s exactly what I did.
Unrelatedly, Mark Howard (who works at London South Bank University and who I used to work with in East London in the days when I was a community mental health nurse) has also been kind enough to comment on a post, and to mention that he sometimes points his students here. Hello again Mark, and hello to your students too – and thanks for your collective interest.
And today I’ve been planning a new Professional Doctorate module, and have been deliberately embedding links to this blog in my teaching materials. So what all of this is making me realise is that a blog (mostly) oriented towards research and academic stuff might, over time, become a useful educational resource. I actually can’t think of any other way in which a personal repository of papers, commentaries, onwards links and so on might be brought together.
Ben Hannigan's blog 
It’s funny you should mention the role of this blog in your teaching. Actually, I started my blog exactly because I felt that I needed a repository for the great examples of marketing in practice, that I kept coming across in my daily life and that I wanted to refer to in my classes.
Having said that, I do, at times, feel self conscious about peppering my slides or teaching materials with links to the blog. It is a nagging worry that the referrals may be construed as self-promotion, which is – of course – silly.
Ah, yes, I recognise this idea of being self-conscious about using a personal blog during teaching. But I’m getting over it the more I do it, and in many ways it’s just another way of doing something I’ve been up to for years: pointing people towards stuff I’ve written, in whatever media (journals, typically). A blog is a display, and putting it out there implies I want people to read it. I’d hate for someone to miss out (if it had something learning-related on it) because I neglected to draw attention to its existence in the classroom!
All the best
Ben