Day three on my new job – Communications and Stakeholder Relations Manager at BCcampus – starts today. I took a week off between the end of the old and the start of the new to rearrange furniture, teach an extra spin class, watch movies with my daughter, and set up a home office.

I have not used this blog to write about my work as a communications professional; primarily because the past four years have been spent writing communications advice, speeches and news releases for the provincial government (I was in the Public Affairs Bureau). I enjoyed the work, learned a great deal and made some great friendships and connections with very talented PR professionals, but I was also somewhat disconnected from the fruits of my labour.

In short, I was putting words in someone else’s mouth and providing advice on how to defend policies or decisions with which, at times, I disagreed. Even when I did support the programmes about which I was writing (which was, happily, most of the time), confidentiality and political sensitivities prevented me from even talking about what I was working on.

That’s about to change. BCcampus is an innovative organization that connects 25 post-secondary institutions across the province using web-based technologies. Collaboration and therefore transparency are the operational imperatives. I’m delving into online learning, educational technology, web-based business applications I could only have dreamed about when I was a grad student fifteen years ago.

This job will feed the geek and the academic within me. I’m looking forward to sharing more of my professional life here.