Personal Blogs

I have just finished reading the paper by Oliver (2002).

It was strange reading this as it the general descriptions generally seemed to fit my current job, although I've never really heard the term used before.

I currently collaborate with the teaching staff I work with to develop the curriculum using technology. Educational value is the main focus of what I do. Although I have little authority over the curriculum we use, I have influence through technical knowledge.

I've been in this role for around 3 years (although it has changed a lot in that time and I have had some influence in how it has developed) and have been working for the WSET for around 4 years. I am in the 25-35 age range and am not involved in lecturing.

My role is broad and includes providing admin support for distance learning students as well as collaborating with other members of staff to develop technology use in distance learning and classroom based courses (we have just invested in interactive whiteboards and I played a role in the selection of these and am collaborating with teaching staff to develop activities to use with these).

Until I recently persuaded my boss that it would be beneficial for me to have more time to devote to other things, I was also the librarian.

Recently I have been gaining more of a managerial role for the elearning we do, so perhaps that represents me broadening out into more of an 'elearning professional'. It will be interesting to see how these views change as I read the other papers for this.

References

Oliver, M. (2002) ‘What do learning technologists do?’ [online], Innovations in Education and Training International, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 245–52.

Perkin's (1996) views on society are interesting and I can see some truth in what he describes. Modern industries are consolidating into larger companies through Mergers and Acquisitions (Baldwin et al, 2001), which will obviously lead to Executives and professionals gaining more power, with industries having a wide range of influence on government policy and society as a whole. For example, the current influence of the oil industry (Baker Institute Energy Forum, 2007) and drugs companies (Smith, 2005).

As Perkin highlights this will require greater demand for expertise, which is demonstrated clearly in the UK with the government's push to get more young people through higher education (Labour Party, n.d.).

Although professionals play a large role in shaping modern society, modern information technology and social networking also play a key role as proposed in the Information Society and Networking Society models (Wikipedia, n.d.). Perkin does take these into account to an extent by discussing the need for professionals to develop these technologies, but clearly does not consider them to the extent they have grown in the 12 years since the paper was written.

References

Baker Institute Energy Forum (2007), Strategies and Influence of Emerging National Oil Companies on World Energy Markets, Available from http://www.rice.edu/energy/research/nationaloil/docs/PECNOCstudyprotocolfinal.pdf (accessed 25 November 2008)
Baldwin L, Camm F, Morre N, Appendix C: Industry Consolidation Trends in Federal Contract Bundling, Rand Corporation, Available from http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1224/MR1224.appc.pdf (accessed 25 November 2008)
Perkin, H. (1996) Chapter 1 of The Third Revolution: Professional Elites in the Modern World, London: Routledge.
Labour Party Website, http://www.labour.org.uk/ (accessed 25 November 2008)
Smith R (2005) Curbing the Influence of the Drug Industry: A British View. PLoS Med 2(9): e241, Available from http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020241&ct=1 (accessed 25 November 2008)
Wikipedia (n.d.), Information Society, Available from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_society (accessed 25 November 2008)
Wikipedia (n.d.), Network Society, Available from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_society (accessed 25 November 2008)

I wanted to continue my reflection on the first 2 weeks with some on the rest of the course as we go along, so in an attempt to catch up I shall start now considering week 3.

The activities for week 3 seemed to be mainly reading the case-studies and considering how they related to our own situations.

Personally, I haven't had a large amount of experience with ePortfolios, so MyStuff is coming as a first introduction. However, I am interested in seeing how they can be used for formative assessment and progress tracking.

My version of Activity 2.1 may have benefitted from including more critique as I felt at the time I was being mainly descriptive of the applications I read about. However, as these are just notes on the papers we read, maybe it's better that it is descriptive. There was some reflection in the posts on the forum.

At the end of that week was the optional reflection activity. I was keen to do this before starting on the reading about reflection and this did push me well into week 4, but I think it was worthwhile to get my thoughts together for the first 2 weeks.