All entries for Sunday 05 December 2004

December 05, 2004

Work review, part three – organisation and planning

Follow-up to Work review, part two – teaching from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

  • scheduling and arranging meetings
  • definition of agenda
  • task identification and specification
  • identification and agreement of roles and responsibilities
  • delegation
  • time-slot protection
  • tracking of progress
  • communication of progress
  • prioritisation of projects
  • prioritisation of tasks

Robert O'Toole : 05 Dec 2004 21:21 |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

Work review, part two – teaching

Follow-up to Work review, part one – programming from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

  • designing sessions to be taught
  • designing series of sessions
  • writing hands-on course IT support materials
  • teaching hands-on technical sessions
  • lectures & large non-interactive presentations
  • writing post-course IT support materials
  • small group (5) technical sessions
  • focus-groups/consultancy sessions
  • postgraduate sessions
  • undergraduate sessions
  • staff sessions

Robert O'Toole : 05 Dec 2004 20:12 |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

Work review, part one – programming

This is the first part of some work that I am doing to review my position as an E-learning Advisor. The job has become very big, sprawling across every king of activitity related to e-learning. Now I really need to get a representation of all of its aspects, and consider priorities. To start of with, I'm just listing aspects of what I do, and rating each of them. The rating is a rating of how much I enjoy doing them. As I only ever enjoy things that I think I'm actually good at (or maybe I become good at things that I enjoy), this is the best way for me to start to get a sense of what I am really good at (and what I need to prioritise, and how I can best work with the rest of the team). I'll then get comments from my colleagues to give me a more substantial reality check.

So here's the first list, starting with some activities in software development…

  • Working with people in their context to identify key functionality that will make a difference to them.
  • Using my own experience of the academic process to understand and empathise with their academic/personal process.
  • Creating compact and self-contained bits of web functionality that add interactivity, community and academic-usefulness to web content.
  • Creating ways of building links between content and activities in separate systems to make a more cohesive experience.
  • Getting feedback from people, seeing it making a difference.
  • Writing flexible, resuseable, extendable OO 'business logic' code.
  • Using a sophisticated OO IDE (Eclipse) that makes writing code faster and more reliable.
  • Good well planned testing.
  • Rapid user interface development (Javascript).
  • Creating data-storage solutions that give power to end-users in an intuitive and easy to access way.
  • Desigining the visual appearance of applications and pages.
  • Creating designs in Photoshop.
  • Creating designs with css.

Robert O'Toole : 05 Dec 2004 10:03 |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem