Market of one

Cory Doctorow, writing in the Guardian:

I have loads of little scripts, programs, systems, files and such that make perfect sense to me, even though they're far from elegant or perfect. There's the script I use for resizing and uploading images to Boing Boing, the shelf I use to organise my to-be-read pile, the carefully-built mail rules that filter out spam and trolls and make sure I see the important stuff. I am a market of one: no one wants to make a commercial proposition out of filling my needs, and if they did, your average curator would be nuts to put something so tightly optimised for my needs into the public sphere, where it would be so much clutter.

One bit that stands out for me: I am a market of one

I like that. I like it a lot. Makes me think of consumer culture and learning styles. Something to think about, definitely.

Strangely compelling

I'm not sure what this collection of pictures has to do with Shibboleth, but I suspect it might be something.

Take a tour of European cities and their misplaced manhole covers. It's much more interesting than it sounds, I promise.

Living in the future

Watching some 'classic' DS9 the other day something frightening occured to us. Being passed around, poked and studied, these devices are all over the space station.

They're iPads.

The same thing happens when we're travelling around London. Some tube stations have projectors which play video adverts on the walls opposite the platforms.

We're living in the future.

A Power to Persuade | The Weekly Standard

A Power to Persuade The Weekly Standard:

When Anthony Patch, one of Fitzgerald’s failed heroes, learns that “desire
cheats you,” he refers to a phenomenon we now recognize as the power of glamour:
“It’s like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds
some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it—but when we do
the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you’ve got the inconsequential part,
but the glitter that made you want it is gone—.” We may demand the sparkling
surface, like a cellophane coating, yet what we are able to grasp will be of
little consequence. Glamour wields the power to capture its viewers’ attention
as if by a spell that fascinates and arrests. .  .  . Transfixed, one gazes at a
world of possibility that is foreclosed, inaccessible, yet endlessly
alluring.

Glamour, of course, can gild not only inconsequential objects but deeply
consequential ones, including political leaders, policies, and ideas. Here,
although she never discusses such subjects, Brown’s analysis offers a useful
warning: “Glamour did not emerge from human warmth, morals, and the messy
emotions that define the everyday,” she writes of Hollywood glamour photography.
“Rather, in their place was the coolly aloof and beautifully coiffed
personality, hovering over the multiple indignities of life on the ground.”
Glamour not only makes things look better than they really are. It also tends to
edit out human complexity—including, in the political realm, the complexity of
disagreements, of clashing values, of diverse wants, of technological, economic,
and moral tradeoffs.

Powerful stuff.

Time, gentlemen

This one has been bouncing around my head for a while now. Not sure why it chose this morning to fall out, but there you go.

Work-life balance, DINKs, flexi-time, paternity leave, contract work, visiting tutor...

Is full-time employment unworkable?

I'm no social historian, but I'm not so naïve as to believe that we had a perfect world where men went out to work and women stayed at home looking after the 2.4 children. That never happened. The only reason we think it happened was because society was run by the privileged few people for which that happened. Anyway...

More and more women are choosing to be in the workplace, resulting in wonderful things like maternity leave and flexible working hours. The concept of work-life balance has arisen out of this. I'm quite happy working part-time. If I worked full-time, I'm not sure I'd have enough time for all the other stuff I have to do, like ironing and baking oaty bun things and sawing bits of wood.

So, what will happen to the concept of full-time employment? I'm not so sure it's much cop any more.

Del Preston, the world's most advanced practitioner

"It's an old trick I picked up from an eLearning conference when I was tweeting with my phone... S'probably why kids can't be taught by conventional methods..."

Don't know why, but the image came to me...

Return trip

I have been approached by one of the Head of one of the Departments I work for and asked to consider joining a team of pretty high-ranking college bods on a trip to China. We're trying to set up links with a college outside Beijing who want to teach some of our Business courses.

I'm not sure how I feel about going back to China, particularly in a work capacity. It'll be weird, but good, I think. I just don't know.

Cahoots

Been talking shop with a Secondary teacher of my acquaintance and esteem. As far as I can make out, FE and Secondary teaching is very similar on paper when it comes to hours and time. The only real difference I can see is the amount of work a secondary teacher has to mark each week, and the class sizes, which makes more marking and more work. I'm guessing it would be impossible to fit all of this into PPA time, which, I'm told, is 10% of contact time, roughly 2¹⁄_bit hours. Even after an insane first couple of years teaching a subject and getting all the materials made and courses planned, it would still take more than this to do a good job.

My other point of curiosity was about status, arising out of my current stagnation. I see him as a real teacher, as he was trained before he started, works incredibly hard and genuinely aims to disturb his students to the point where they can learn (his Nazi party-piece is the stuff of legend). He, on the other hand, sees me as the real teacher, as I deal with skills and people who feel the need for these skills in the real world.

Perhaps we're both individually thinking that we're still not quite good enough for the responsibilities we've taken on. From where we're standing, the other one looks like an expert, and the trouble with experts is they make everything look easy.

Stagnation

I've become stagnant. It's hard to admit, but after a string of decidedly average observations, I have to face the fact that I'm not as good a teacher as I think I am.

The abstractions and distractions of Masters level study seemingly do not help. Instead, they suggest pretense and smugness, not things you want when you're coasting along doing as little work as possible to keep your classes fresh and experimental.

The temptation is to read more stuff about language teaching, and take a step back from the scholarly, worthy articles. What I really need to do is pull my finger out.

Reflective Learning Journals

While reading Research, supervision, and the network society

The Reflective Journal, now being submitted as part of teacher training portfolio, is an altogether different type of writing from the assignments alongside. It fosters all the aspects of thought and language that academic discourse continues to defend itself against. The real value of the RLJ lies precisely in these aspects, and its ability to connect theory and practice so subjectively.

We're gonna need cake... Lotsa cake...

I'm hatching plans involving Moodle training in the college.

Instead of trying to get everyone to fit their teaching into Moodle, I'm going to suggest doing it the other way round. We start with the teachers and what they want to be able to do, and we see if Moodle is the answer. It may not be, and that's something we need to accept.

But here's the thing. I've studied the demographics, I've walked around the college and I've made more than a few transactions in the currency of hair/shoes/bag compliments that hold so much value in my office. Two conclusions:

1. There's a lot of women in teaching
2. People who take their work as seriously as I do are few and far between

Improving your teaching is a simple process of talking to other people and trying new things. If we could get people together to talk to each other about their teaching, we'll be onto a winner. How do we do that, given my two conclusions above?

Shifting Sands

Nice little article here, ostensibly about the changes needed to teacher training in FE in light of the new diploma schemes and the increased numbers of 14-16 students in colleges. It also includes a very brief treatment of the perceived failings of teacher training for FE teachers in general, and quotes Kennedy (1997) defining FE as 'what is not school and not university'. I like that idea.

There's an impassioned rant brewing somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind about professionalism as variously defined by the GTC, the HEA and LLUK, but in the meantime I need to think about my own teacher training programmes. How can I train all my students to jump through all the hoops while at the same time preparing them to navigate the shifting sands of FE classrooms, organisations and policy?

First assignment

Right then.

Bad back means I have a whole day to look at the first assignment for the OU course I'm on. I have to look at 4 JISC case studies where people have embedded technology into their teaching.

Having only read their little bulletins in the library, I'm a little bit wary of JISC. As an organisation set up specifically to promote ICT and e-learning, I'm conscious of the fact that 'they would say that'.

We'll see if today's reading will confirm or otherwise.

Technology of the written word

I should go and work in the library more, as it's there that interesting things pop out of my head. Here's one, thinking about literacy, society, technology and the future:

Is it our goal to widen literacy participation to the point at which 100% of the population are actively taking part in the literacy practices that will define our places in such a society? What would such a society look like and sound like? What is the technology of the written word now making possible?

Intangible qualities

I was looking for a suitably hackle-raising story to get my blog going, and this turned up at the opportune moment. In short, an 'on-screen test' to 'screen potential teachers' for 'intangible qualities that define every great teacher'.

What part of 'intangible' don't they understand?

Here's another question for you: Have you ever exaggerated your abilities and experiences on a CV or job application? If you were sat in front of set of tick-boxes on a computer asking about organisation, flexibility and resilience, would you exaggerate in the same way if there was a whiff of a job?

If you want to have good teachers, you need to allow good teachers to be good teachers. That takes time, time off, space, esteem and sleep.

Title track

According to current research at the University of Wikipedia, the left hemisphere of the brain deals with "language: grammar/vocabulary, literal". That's a fair description of me.

The writing part has everything to do with hypothesis, reflection, Vygotsky and organisation, skipping merrily back and forth over the boundaries between study, work and life.