This is not a personal blog, but I must mark this special week because it is the close of a major period of my life. I went to Nottingham Trent University in 1985 as a mature student, majoring in English and History, with an option in Information technology. Upon completing my degree I began writing and teaching at NTU, and in 1995 founded the trAce Online Writing Centre with Simon Mills. I have been at this university for 20 years and its landscape is very familiar, but it is time to move on and I very much look forward to my new job at De Montfort University.
This is the text of the mailout we sent today to the many trAce users around the globe:
Dear trAce subscribers
This week I am leaving my position as Artistic Director of the trAce Online Writing Centre to take up the post of Professor of New Media in the School of Media and Cultural Production at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK, starting 1.1.05. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all those who have supported trAce over the years since it began in 1995. It has been a pleasure working with you to create and share this amazing cyberspace community. We have learned many lessons together: lessons of collaboration, friendship, identity, ethics, and society. Now that the net has connected so many people already, and with more of us joining all the time*, I am optimistic that we can build a real and practical international democracy to transcend the current political rhetorics which serve only to divide us. The internet has given us a voice and we must use it.
trAce will not accompany me to DMU, but will remain at Nottingham Trent University with its current team, and will continue to provide the usual mix of challenging articles, news and innovative projects that have made us so successful. The trAce Online Writing School is currently offering a series of great courses plus the ongoing workshop, and Kids on the Net continues as usual, both managed by Helen Whitehead. I’m also proud to announce that the trAce site has been selected for archiving by the British Library and the UK Web Archiving Consortium, an extra resource to add to the searchable trAce Archive to be launched in 2005 and funded by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts. Look out, too, for a new online writing project from trAce in the coming months.
In terms of practicalities, my successor has not yet been appointed and in the interim Dr Lynne Hapgood, Head of the English Division at Nottingham Trent University, is the point of contact for enquiries about trAce’s future plans. Email her at lynne.hapgood@ntu.ac.uk, or for general trAce enquiries please contact Kate Wilkinson at trace@ntu.ac.uk You can also post your views about trAce past, present and future at the forums http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/forums/
My email address sue.thomas@ntu.ac.uk will continue to work for a while, or contact me via my Hello World blog http://travelsinvirtuality.typepad.com/
With affection and gratitude
Sue Thomas
*However, most of the world still remains unconnected - currently there are 934 million online [1] but the world population is 6,406 million [2].
[1] http://www.clickz.com/stats/sectors/geographics/article.php/5911_151151
[2] http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/ipc/popclockw
