All entries for Wednesday 22 September 2004

September 22, 2004

Flat pack therapy

Follow-up to No such thing as a free lunch from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

And after all that stress, the best thing that I could do was build a new bed for the guest room. No woodwork required. Wonderful Argos flatpack furniture. And it worked, unlike the coffee table that broke in two as I carried it up the stairs.

It was so satisfying to be able to jump onto it and not have it collapse onto the floor. Now I shall celebrate with champagne, and a photo…


Robert O'Toole : 22 Sep 2004 20:47 |  Comments (2) |  Report a problem

No such thing as a free lunch

This was my task. In one hour introduce a group of new(ish) lecturers to:

  • the e-learning advisor team;
  • IT provisions and support that they should expect for staff and students;
  • the key e-learning and web architecture tools;
  • plagiarism prevention and detection tools;
  • the 20+ other things that we are promoting, developing, or just starting to get interested in;
  • respond to issues raised during all of the sessions of the WTC's first day;
  • respond to a case study covering plagiarism, group work, admin overload, cultural issues, disability issues, ethical issues, time-keeping and study skills and more.

And so I tried to put together a presentation to do all of this. Having had to deal with too many emails, phone calls and other contacts and issues during the day, I was left to work on this until 10pm last night.

I attended the first day of the WTC's induction course, and found it to be fascinating and useful. I had many opportunities to gather requirements and pick up ideas. I talked to real live lecturers with real requirements. I even met the new philosophy lecturer, who is very interesting and has done some interesting things with IT in the past. Lots of the issues raised were answered with techniques that we are investigating and promoting.

Unfortunately, the whole thing ran behind schedule. Kay (Skills and PDP) and Rachel (Learning Grid) had 10 minute slots to explain their work. Only 30 minutes remained into which I could compress all that I had planned. And to make matters worse I had a small technical problem with SiteBuilder, compounded by my inability to type in the dark due to my eye problem (the screen was too faint to use with the lights on). So it ended up too rushed and muddled.

Anyhow, the lecturers seemed to be interested, and asked some good questions about blogs. I left with a good set of 'registration of interest' forms on which individuals expressed interest in getting more support for specific tools and projects. And I did get lunch at Scarman House as part of the deal.


Robert O'Toole : 22 Sep 2004 20:41 |  Tags:   |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem