Rather than fretting about what I haven’t been doing cough#reading the literature#cough, I’m going to take a moment to reflect on what I’ve been doing instead, because it’s not like I’ve been lazing by the pool. I’ve been doing things that (I hope) will inform my research by giving me a bigger picture view of education and Higher Ed.
I went to the ePortforum for a couple of days – chatted with people using ePortfolios, learnt about what they’ve been doing, how social constructivism aligns with ePortfolios (quite well really), considered what the best applications for ePortfolios are (leaning towards competency based education and employability skills), enjoyed glorious Sydney weather and marvellous company, went to Joyce Seitzinger’s always great workshop on learning design principles and chatted to more of my education advisor (EdAd) peers about the value of setting up a Special Interest Group (SIG) through HERDSA
Consulted with EdAd peers on Twitter about the SIG and put an application in to formally run one through HERDSA. (To be completely honest, I’m not 100% certain about whether this is the best approach and what benefits being under this umbrella will bring but doing something seems better than umming and aahing).
Worked for far too long on an application to become a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. (Better part of the last three weekends). This involved a lot of critical reflection and writing, describing my philosophy of teaching and coming up with a couple of case studies about leadership and mentoring. These were particularly challenging because my perspective on mentoring is that a reciprocal relationship of equals is a far better approach – fortunately there is a body of literature out there to back this up. Long story short I wrote far more than needed for each section and had to do some brutal editing. I tend to use a lot of qualifiers (there’s one – tend) in my writing but mostly because I like the nuance that they bring. As it turns out, I hadn’t quite grasped (to be generous) exactly what was needed for the case studies and have been advised that an application for a level down (Fellow) is far more likely to succeed. As the first professional staff member to apply to become a Senior Fellow, this is a shame but I’ve also spent more time on the application than I’d expected and I truly need to get back into “proper” study/research. I’ve also been told by the big cheese in the process that he will advise me on my SFHEA application in the new year. It was nice -though taxing – to get stuck into some writing.
I’ve also been working on an infrastructure project which seems to be coming along – well actually two at the same time. (Kind of the same thing in two different locations with different stakeholders though, so that helps). It’s a One Button Studio – essentially a video booth with present lighting, sound, camera, backdrop – all a presenter needs to do is plug in their USB drive and hit “the button” to start recording a reasonable quality video. Learning a lot about the range of stakeholders and moving parts – there is construction to be done, cabling, contractors, sound analysis, hardware purchasing, security, questions of who owns which spaces and how we get into them, internal politics, support arrangements, questions about how sophisticated to go (as simple as possible) and somewhere in there user requirements. It does let me bang on a little about sociomaterial theory however and affordances.
STELLAR wrapped up – in some ways it kind of limped to the finish line with maybe 4 still active participants at the end but lots of valuable feedback and ideas for the next iteration. Pokemon Go has actually been giving me some inspiration – the random way that mini-challenges (catch a Pokemon with a randomised level of difficulty) pop up on a semi-regular basis has made me think about ways to release single question quizzes in Moodle on a timer of some description and some kind of rewards system for “collecting” different kinds. (That part is far more in the abstract so far)
I was also very kindly sent up to Brisvegas for a flying visit to the Students As Partners conference, in exchange for my outsider perspective via tweets (tick, done) and a blog post (coming soon, I swear). First impressions are that this is a potentially rewarding and enriching process that democratises education. There are a few core questions to be dealt with – how to ensure that student involvement is representative and beneficial and how much can/do students really know about what they need to learn? The event itself was run spectacularly well with a lot of student involvement and a very dynamic mixture of tag-teaming presenters, frequent discussion (at tables) breaks and a ‘world cafe’ approach in the afternoon. As I say, more on this soon.
I also put a proposal together to present at MoodlePosium which may or not have been conveniently copy-pasted from my HEA application in the spirit of reusable learning objects and also wrote up a strong enough argument to get to go to ASCILITE at the end of November.
On a more prosaic note, I reinstalled Windows 10 on my workhorse because it had developed a worrying habit of crashing on shutdown and some restart glitches and I assume most of you know how time-consuming that process can be, not the reinstall as much as tracking down all the software I had installed and serials and updates and whatnot.
Now I’m taking a week off work to get back to reading and reflecting and the research literature and oh dear I just thought about how cranky my project plan is going to be with me. I’m sorry planny, we can work this out – please don’t give up on me yet.
Also all the day to day work stuff and trying to help come up with practical and satisfactory approaches to satisfy stricter new national reporting requirements for Higher Education that are coming up in the new year, as well as keeping an eye on major education projects in the college that I haven’t been asked for help on with yet
Oh and also finalising the governance documents and proposals for the TEL/Online learning groups that I’m on at work that went to the executive last week. Of which there has been zero reporting back from the representatives that went to the meeting. I could chase it up but I’m trying hard to not look at workmail this week, so it can wait. Probably.