Personal Blogs

It's generational, but those of us brought up with handwriting competitions at school and handwritten essays and the written examination are judgmental of a generation who apparently have terrible handwriting and can't spell.

Do they need to? They can touch type - can you? Faced with a sheet of paper and a pen to write an essay they may struggle to be legible and make spelling mistakes - but how often do they do that, or will they need to that. 

Isn't it like complaining in the 8th century that scribes would be rubbish with a chisel putting their words in stone.

The goal is everything - clear communication. Doesn't technology deliver this?

An assignment managent tool from inception, through feedback, assessment and grading. 

Rather than retreat, the OU should become a residential, campus based university. Instead of making huge numbers of tutors redundant they should be kept on to work directly with students in blended platforms, directly and at a distance. The OU has the library, has lecture halls and seminar rooms, and the real estate and land. 

Most importantly it has the courage to reinvent itself.

What else can it do when every university and college has attached to it a distance and blended learning component?

This step must be taken before it is too late. 

The first students should be on campus from September 2018.

This is both a reminder to me, and a suggestion to others. I find that far more is achieved by being positive and 'can do' without being overly enthusiastic to the point of being unreasonable. I am prone to say 'yes' to any request I get from people to do a thing. I was brought up where all request were met with a firm 'no' before I had even finished my sentence ... It's taken a few decades to get over that one.

Meanwhile, as I emerge from a temporary 'blank' where I went off radar with viral bronchitis that turned into bacterial bronchitis I am starting to feel refreshed and even re-invigorated.

The world of e-Learning is my future and at last I have a stake in it as a 'Learning Technologist'.

Many years ago I opted to get into TV from the bottom, not as a trainee producer. I got to make coffee, type up scripts, prepare budgets, organise presenters and actors ... and in time to liase with agents, to edit, to write scripts and direct.

I would have loved an apprenticeship, even an old fashioned 'Technical College' to my academic training at Oxford, even, to some degree to the mixed academic/hands on experience of the Open University MA in Open and Distance Education. 'Getting Your Hands' dirty as soon as possible matters. 

Think of working online as more like learning to cook or garden. You will never learn to garden or cook simply by reading books, attending lectures and seminars, researching and writing essays: you must do.

I would also hope and encourage people who study part-time to be 'in the business' they are studying - I was too tangential to it and so lacked the insight of a practising teacher (in primary, tertiary, or secondary).

Meanwhile, good luck Open University in a world where every university is rapidly offering distance learning online ala OU.

As I expressed here six years ago, one day every university will be like the OU, but will the OU ever be like other universities and have 10,000 campus based undergraduates and post-graduates on site? 

I wanted to write something about Active Learning.

I gave it 20 minutes of thought, writing it here. But the platform repeatedly failed to save it once I added tags and I lost it.

I've rather lost the will to have another go.

Another time.

Active learning is important.

Engage with you work.

Take notes through the filter of your own mind when reading or sitting through a lecture. Do not cut and paste or write down what is said verbatim. 

It is never too late to get this right. In my case I am completing my second MA and working on a dissertation. I have a habit of indulging unnecessarily a tortuous process of reading, note taking and refining when I could get to the point sooner simply by committing my ideas to paper right away. 

It is these moments that I will lace together into an essay, not a serious of highlighted chunks from the book. 

There is an abundance of material online regarding 'how to take notes'. 

What is the best. most effective way to take notes? 

The OU used to produce an excellent book on how to be a student or some such. 

This all began in May 2016 so I've been tinkering around with Veganism for a while. My daughter would argue that I am 'Plant Based' ... and lack the willpower or evangelism to be truly Vegan. I wear a leather belt and have sheepskin slippers on as I write.

Once in a blue moon, or to be more exact, once in a full moon I may succumb to something with egg, or even ham in it. This is invariably when I am away from home. In the A&E of the regional hospital for the best part of 5 hours I went on a quest for a Vegan sandwich and had to make do with the 'Vegetarian' Salmon and soft cheese sandwich. 

Why go vegan? Take you pick:

1) It tastes fantastic: fresh pesto and pasta, Siam soup, dips and chutneys, risottos and a wide range of burgers and falafels and of course salads and fruit raw. 

2) It's cheaper. This lot cost under £60. Meat, fish, milk and cheese would push this up considerably.

3) It's healthier. We've checked and between the variety of nuts and range of foods we lack no vitamins. Our gut isn't suited to take quantities milk we have become used to. It helps to cut out sugar too. Vegan's can be unhealthy and overweight by living on fizzy drinks and crisps. 

4) It's ethical. If you think this way. I didn't for 18 months. 'Nothing with a face on it' has been raised and killed.

5) It'll feed the planet. It will feed more people and reduce degredation of the natural environment.

6) I'll save the environment. Farm raised meat, poultry and fish, especially if it is on an industrial scale, damages the environment. 

7) It's less messy in the kitchen. No fat and grease on pans, kitchen surfaces or blocking the drain and sink. 

8) Less waste. Waste can be composted.

9) Less packaging. Fruit and veg can be bought lose and put in paper bags. 

10) Grow your own. For taste and convenience. You can grow a good deal of it yourself.

11) Saves energy. Less cooking. 

12) Greater karma. Relax. Love life. 

13) Be part of the movement. The 'early adopters' got there first so taking this on now you become part of the peak uptake. 

Some essentials for the Vegan Kitchen: 

A cookbook that has recipes with cultural relevance i.e. typically every day foods from India, Asia, Africa and some Mediterranean. 

Food blender

Spice Grinder. Great for nuts, pesto and chuntney blending too. 

Ginger

Red Onions

Garlic

Garam Masala

Tumeric

Chick Peas (buy dry and soak overnight)

Nuts: Pine nuts, cashew, pistachio, walnuts ...

Seeds: Sesame, mixed.

Soya Milk

And so much more ... 

I'm still doing MindMaps and still using SimpleMind. Having compiled, builty on and grouped ideas, authors, bullet points and quotes the entire thing can be exported as a Text File. A bit of shuffling about, a few added notes and links and you have a coherent and detailed article, piece or chapter.

In my case this is part I of a three part dissertation on the opening weeks of the First World War in Great Britain. 

As the fog clears and belatedly the history dissertation I have been working on for ten months starts to ’show itself’ to me I find I am using insights gained from degrees in geography and in education and from the one OU MBA module I completed on ‘Creativity and Change’. 

I am applying the theory of the diffusion of Innovations to the enlistment of civilian volunteers into Kitchener’s New Army in the first weeks of the First World War.

'The Reputation Game' is a compelling read that has you nodding along in agreement, turning the page for another insight and then pausing to take in the academic research. Written by a former Financial Times journalist and PR guru David Waller and a Business School academic Rupert Younger, the blend of the journalism and the academic gives you two books beautifully blended into one.

It is a business book. The kind you can buy for a relative at Christmas.

I find you become engrossed for hours a at time - it has that ‘can’t put it down’ quality, but also as it skips through so many examples and references that any of these can form a satisfying quick read making it good not only for a commute, but to flick through between stops on the underground.

I know a dozen people who should have a copy, one who probably wishes he had written it. On the one hand I can send them this review, on the other I might just buy them copies and tell them why they should read it and how it well both be a pleasure to read and of value to them either because they have a ‘reputation’ to maintain, build or rejuvenate, or because they are in the business of doing this for others, both individuals and organisations.

My review: http://bit.ly/2zBMlZR 

I don't know about you but I learn best by doing and making mistakes. I want to get stuck in, be guided, give it a go and try again and keep trying. These is harder to do in academia than in just about every other walk of life. We should be knocking out short essays every week in preparation for the longer, tutor marked assignments. 

As an OU student on the MAODE I went 'totally digital': no printing off, books on an iPad, type everything off. No more! It made my brain soft and inclined to lazy ineffective learning practices like highlighting passages or cutting and pasting text instead of taking notes the proper way.

I'm now all paper and pen. Handwritten notes in files like it was 1979. Once I've got a draft written THEN I will go the the computer to type it up, add footnotes, correct, share, fix, correct, adjust and eventually submit. 

What works for you?

Engaged in several months of research I find myself working my way through around 2000 records relating to some 10000 men who served in the 11th Welsh 'Pals' Cardiff Commercial Battalion and the 9th East Lancashire (Service) Battalion during the First World War. They all enlisted in the first week of September 1914 and all ended up, at first, being billeted on Lewes, in Sussex, where I live. 10,000 men turning up in a town of 10,000 caused quite a commotion. I want to know who they were. Thanks to extensive digitised Soldier Records, Census Returns and the British Newspaper Archive I am starting to build a complex picture.

However, this is like panning for gold. Of the Welsh Pals I am finding that only at best 20% of the Soldier Service Records survived the Blitz (the warehouse caught fire) while the 9th East Lancashires there are less that 10%. Simply listing all the men took time enough. I am sticking to around 2,000 men. Even this might be too many as it can take anything between 10 minutes and an hour to research each name depending on how scrupulous I am feeling and whether the records begin to hint at revealing themselves too many. From time to time, once a week, some magic occurs where I find a photograph and story in a digitised local newspaper, the full Service Record from when they 'attested' in early September all the way through to being discharged in February or March 1919. What matters to me is who they were in civilian life, so the Census return, 'triangulated' with as much as I can uncover, is crucial. I can then be certain that this man was in Lewes. Perhaps he was billeted in a public building, perhaps he stayed in someone's house - perhaps he even camped out with mates in a racehorse owner's stable and was brought breakfast each morning by the owner's butler. 

Sometimes the scorch marks, tears and decay on the old paper record is an apt reminder of a man's story: killed in action. Though my 'men' of the New Army '22nd Division' who served in Salonica for some 2 years, for the most part returned. Those who died in any numbers did so on an attack in September 1918. Plenty caught malaria, some died from it, and many were discharged with a disability rating of something between 10 and 50% because of the malaria. 

My inclination is to engage with and seek out the stories; the formal research I am undertaking will be more an evidence based barrister's paper putting the case that these men enlisted for a multitude of reasons: the weavers out of desperation when the South Lancashire mills closed in August and they found themselves with only a few days work a week, or none at all, while the men of the Cardiff Pals were leaving secure clerical jobs and the businesses they ran. I have found stockbrokers and architects, solicitors and council clerks who enlisted en masse.

And so the evidence reveals itself. And every so often a record makes me smile.

This kind of crowdsourcing science is something the OU pioneered. Use the power of US to do the research. Where do you spot butterflies where you live? What do you see? Here around Lewes with the South Downs were are spoilt for areas that have butterflies in abundance.