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I’m now largely working in the main campus of the University, rather than Ilam West. The retreat from last year now sometimes seems like a distant memory.
Here is the Teaching and Learning Plan:
 I’m still very interested to see how the whole teaching and learning aspects are linked (or otherwise) into the university structure along with the research side. The role of the “Teaching and Learning Centre” is constantly under debate somewhere in the world. One particular place for instance is the POD (Professional Organisational Development) list.
Our retreat was absolutely stock standard: sweaty pitchers of water, mints, postits, butchers paper, felt tip markers and a faciltator. 50 minute lunch break. Nice food (even if it is mass produced) a quick walk round the building and then back into it.
Carol, our particular facilitator was superb. There but unobtrusive, and with a few delightful and highly effective little comments and metaphors she brought to the day. I think she managed to get some genuine ‘Open Space’ elements into our activities and I didn’t feel at any time the boredom and chagrin I have known in other places in the past as I see a golden opportunity flowing out under the door and well and truly lost. She also engendered some trust. I think behind her relaxed appearance she really knew what she was doing.
 . . . as usual, whiteboards covered with the small group work. These emerged a little later into 4 pages of plans and encapsulation. We have some great plans.
The pages are on the top of the filing cabinet in the UCTL office and I look at the pile each day. We were sort of all here for a brief moment yesterday, but the last month has largely been holiday. I’m half shifted from the College (2 km away). The year has been launched.
Had a break, the longest continuous time with no internet or e-mail this century. Checking in with my RSS feeds, most people are posting some sort new year posts.
1. Welcomes to the New Year
2. Reflections on the old year.
eg – Stephen Downes. I could not find a permalink.
2006 was a year of extremes for me. It was a difficult year, but only because it was one where I tried to live my life to the fullest, and I guess I can’t regret that. I made memories to last a lifetime, I touched so many places and so many lives, and was more than rewarded in kind.
I dreamed last night that I was given a fine suit, a thousand dollar suit that I would never buy for myself, with a silk scarf and a long overcoat, that when I wore it I looked like and felt like I had found my success in this life. I trimmed my hair, just a bit, to match the suit, and when I walked down the road, I strode forward with a flourish, waving the tail of my coat behind me.
Kia ora. Thank you, to all of you, and best wishes for the coming year.
Kia ora back, Stephen. Was good to meet you briefly during our Unconference in Christchurch in September.
3. Blog Greetings.
4. Plans for the new year. Marica is planning a daily post for a year, one of many bloggers to do this of course . . . Marica’s Meanderings
5. Goals (see any of the GTD sites . . .) eg 43Folders
I guess there will be a few predictions out there somewhere in the Blogs. I was cleaning out my links today, and found one in the pile from 2004: a list of predictions for 2004 from a few miscellaneous commentators, including Stephen Downes.
Other brief notes:
- LinkedIn: I stumbled on this today, a summary and analysis of the place of linkedIn in the networked world. From Veycosys, a blog I’d never seen before.
Just this week I accepted an invite from Kevin Veich to join his network. Nothing special here – he has over 500 contacts. What is novel for me is that he is interested specifically in Christchurch (where I live), and what we could do here. And then just today I get a question from him asking about some national Trends . . . ie something more than spam and something concrete. I don’t always NEED certainty or anything. Nice sometimes.
- I’ve shifted jobs. Felt quite depressed since making the transition on December 5th.
The College has sort of wound down. But for me I think it was partly tiredness, busyess, end of year blues and sadness at the passing of an institution of 127 years.
Started back on Monday, and saw another person in my work area at the Uni for the first time today. There is some hope, and a lot of potential in the new year.If anyone has any suggestions for effective containers/structures for staff Professional development, I’m interested.
- Coffee. Today Mark came in to work to make coffees again, and Anna made cake. $4.00 deal for coffee and cake.
I started a new job yesterday, similar role, but in a new institution.
We have a meeting next Monday all day to plan the future with an external facilitator. Probably the usual: postit notes, markers, butchers paper, mints and sweaty pitchers of water. Should be good, we have some chance to plan how this new unit will coagulate into something productive.
It is interesting to recall how over the past months the possible structures have emerged as ideas. There are at least three themes. Most of us in the centre will probably fit into all three in one way or another:
- staff development (which is generally prefaced by the word academic)
- educational technology (which is the area I have been slotted into)
- and what I have seen called SOTL – the Scholarship of teaching and learning.
But it is staff development that I am currently immersed in. Even the terminology is a little fraught. I definitely avoid the term ‘Staff training’. My first job, as kind of a precursor to the formal transfer, was to provide some help with the migration from WebCT 4.2 to WebCT 6.0. (Now sometimes referred to as BlackCT or just Blackboard, but that is another story)
I presented 36 workshops for staff. The same old questions besiege me: is this the best we can come up with in models of staff development?
I was interested to note that when I first began reading blogs I saw a lot of blog posts about Blogging. Now I know why. I’m now on my fifth day of tinkering with themes, and blog design. I just wanted a nice simple setup:
- categories & sub-categories
- unobtrusive blog post surround
- some static page support, unobtrusive tabs
- not rounded, postmodern design
- customisable sidebars – three columns
- a colour scheme I could live with
- graphic header
- Full width
Do you think this is easy? Things have grown a lot more complex and fun since we first started designing our own blog 2 years ago. I started with the themes . . .
There is the themes directory for WordPress. One at random: MamboPress. These themes are very good of course, but not many have the things I need, and in many the implementation seems patchy. Tim of course tells me this is normal and I just need to learn to hack the code cause I will never get what I want out of the box.
At present I am using Anaconda. K2 plus Mollio > Anaconda. However I may not continue with this. They are seriously going commercial. There is a free support forum with about 20 questions on it, some 70 days old and no answers. But I do like the theme. It has support for a few nice plugins. Like the tags you see on the left. But, this created a problem.
How do I want to categorise my blog? It might end up something like this:
* Blogging (11) * Coffee (1) * Communities (7) * Community of Practice (4)
* Conferences (2) * Cool Tools (8) * E-Learning (3) * Events 05 (1)
* FLLiNZ (5) * Food (2) * Leadership (7) * Learning (6) * mylife (8)
* ole (5) * Quotes (1) * Stillpoint (4) * Storytelling (2) * Travel (1)
* two point zero (1) * Web 2.0 (8) * Whimsey (4)
But do I want several communities categories? What about OLE PLE VLE (etc) which is a HUGE preoccupation at the moment, but I may get bad news on Monday and it may be off the radar. And where do I put special topics I want to actively promote like Feuerstein? I probably need an articles page.
Then there is tagging. What do I do with tags? There is the potential to create something quite special with tags, to search for and find just what you want, and serve up the posts in lots of different ways.
Other blogs I really like the design of.
- http://www.boschmans.net/ (But dn’t you hate Google ads sometimes . . .)
- http://www.4th-design.com/ sNews based, one of my all time current favourites with the new one post, stuff at the bottom style)
- Gridlock Black, modern . . .
- Dark Ritual has a nice three column approach, full height on the right . . . Pages in the wrong place though. This I thought I might have been able to hack, and get tabs where I need them.
- And I guess this, even if it is two columns, as a prize winning theme I have used a bit . . Connections http://www.billvanloo.com/ is based on this with a non-blog page at the front. I may go this way also.
Then came the question of asides. For a musing on asides, and probably an overuse of them see Photo Matt. And http://weblogtoolscollection.com/ for another use of them. Little postlets between real posts, but very appropriate for this blog – just a collection of links really. But how frustrating – they would be a lot better listed in one place. But you can make comments. In amidst the extreme clutter.
Tim (who has another neat blog format, his whole life in 4 categories) told me about asides.
One category in WP is set aside as an aside category and these are treated in a special way. I will activate this sometime.
The standard default message for WordPress:
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
I’ve just ported all my posts to WordPress. I think this will be where I stay for a while.
AFTERWORD 1 Dec 2006: Someone has found this blog when I wasn’t ready.  I am still trying to get a style I like. Watch this space.
I think I answered this question in Florence. Probably.
However, it is a little more complex than this for me. It is to do with focus or lack of it. A blog does need some sort of focus, and this is what I’ve lacked over the past months.
I work at a small institution which is merging with a local University. My trajectory has been very unclear. Now I am heading into the University of Canterbury’s UCTL: Centre for Teaching and Learning – into a new section. I won’t mention it’s title. My role remains the same in name and basically the same in description. But as to how this works out, we have a lot to decide and find out. So where I am going institution wise and department is sorted. But not my location, my actual work and a whole range of other questions. These will need to be worked out.
So I think I’m back after my break from this blog.
In this time I have spent two periods of several weeks lately considering a career change as I wondered if the complexity here was getting too much for me. I bumped into Colin Bell, the High School teacher from the 60′s who really turned me onto teaching and remained a role model for me when I was in the classroom. He has remained current and vibrant all this time later. I nearly went out to his school last term to do some “guest spots” to see if I still had any teaching left in me. I’ve been strugglng with NCEA physics recently in the vicarious involvement with my son at year 11. One other option had turned up that I toyed with as well.
Helping run the unconference open space event at the College last term with the ::FLNW:: travellng roadshow also helped shape my eventual response. As well as three weeks in Italy.
What will I focus on? That’s a good question, and will emerge.
- Prmarly community. The online worlds they can live in. And learning.
- Then there is the LMS, PLE, CMS, VLE world, particularly open source, partiularly Interact. But it will also include WebCT. And I have done a little staff development this year at Lincoln using Moodle.
- This spills over to Web 2.0, and the course TT701: Teaching meets technology. Trying to make this work with a real group of students, who generaly know a lot more tha me in at least one significant area.
- Some stories may emerge here in the Staff Professional development field as this is part of my future, and I am currently up to WebCT workshop number 25 at Canterbury. This leads on to my interest in unconferences. Clickers. Interactive whiteboards. Podcasting/audio files for lecturers.
This is my fifth blog, now unofficially launched. I’ve not finished sorting the categories yet, but this can wait. How do you choose good categories? The old question of ontology and taxonomy again.
We have planned a blog component for interact for a year or so now. Now we have one. Anonymous comments and RSS to come soon, so there are purists who may say this is not a REAL blog, but that’s OK.
AFTERWORD: I have decided to move from Interact as a blog to WordPress. Interact’s blogs are more as a support to learning communities. (8/12/06)
I have wanted some greater functionality than I could get from pLog. I value real power in posting (images, links, flash, formatting) and I wanted users to have this as well. I did not want to have to include HTML tags in either posts or comments, or have anything complex about uploading images. For this I’ve decided to sacrifice some of the the really nice things about WordPress, Lifetype (ex pLog) etc. What the hackers do to this we shall see. We have a fallback plan.
I also want easy document upload, kind of like an alongside content management system. A pLog plus Interact solution which I used for a while was a bit clunky, and setting up a series of folders in dreamweaver + ftp was still too restricting.
A little bit of history:
My first blog, set up as a favour, lasted a of couple of months until the support person who set went back to his old job. I went back to retrieve the posts a little later and it was gone. Ce la vie. The perils of using someone else’s server.
My second blog was a group blog for a formal taught course. This was real fun. It was then I discovered an informal rule:
“If you are introducing blogging in a formal taught course, best to have an experienced blogger on hand”
My third blog has one post in it still, and could have been resurrected, but not at the moment. It’s on blogger. Things have moved on, and I think I just wanted more power and control- like images, decent comments etc.
My Fourth Blog was my own installation of pLog on my own domain name. Still http://lits.gen.nz
I actually have started two other blogs this week as well. We need different blogs if we have radically different purposes. I learned a bit about this from Irfan and BlogHui. So I have a space on iCommunities.org (My corperate communities focus) and on InteractOLE.org (My Interact/ole Focus). They not really launched yet, but you can see them.
I am grateful recently to some very helpful input: Lindsey, Mark and Carol for instance, and the crew who attended Bloghui 1.0
I had some minor surgery three weeks ago. I considered blogging about this. Had two little fragments typed into notepad:
 B4: I am really quite apprehensive. Ross Roberts, the Surgeon was great – with a superb bedside manner to match. I wonder if this is something you learn, or are born with. I wonder what my bedside manner would be like, and how it is with clients I work with?
AFTER: Women in the hospital – salt of the earth type. Jab in my wrist and “OK, Mr C, we’ve got in your plumbing, now for the wiring” and I get connected up to another moniter.
There is more, which I won’t post. But I didn’t blog about this in any level of detail. I regret this now, it would have been quite fun.
Who do you blog for?
I’d have quite liked a little backwards reflection. Was it only a week ago I could not turn around in the car and it was an effort to bend down?
Such short memories.
What good is a blog?
I have noticed a couple of blogs with a “Where was I this time last year?” section. Helps keep things in perspective for you, if no-one else.
I’ve porting the posts from pLog to Interact, and it’s been quite interesting and sad to see what I was writing about a while back.
A brief experience at the local service station last week. The guy servng at the counter – a regular – told me a little secret. At least I presume it was a secret.
Me: (swipe, swipe – card was not reading)
Him: Just wait a bit sir. Give it a few seconds.
Me: I do this.
Him: You know sometimes if I am in a particlar mood I watch someone swipe and swipe the card and clear it each time it starts. Then I take the card and swipe it. If I’m feeling in a particlar mood I do this . . .
Me: (Stunned) (Pause) Oh. (Just one of those times I’d have liked to have a nice rejoinder)
Do I go back to this gararge?
Martin Seligman is
The formal site for Positive psychlogy:
http://www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu/
The ‘popular’ site:
http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/
Peter Cammock speaks very highly of Martins work last year.
 I’ve just been reading some more of Learned Optmism. In my opinion this is more than just cheap pop psychlogy.
Today’s little gem (liberally interpreted by me). Think of the context as being speeches or meeting. Rumination and pessimism does little good. Instead action points and optimism.
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