Personal Blogs

I finished off my second 'reference or equivalent' for the FHEA process. Because I'm an AL I do very little work with colleagues in a manner that would ordinarily allow a person to write a reference. So ALs are allowed to provide our line manager (known as a Staff Tutor) for one reference and create a second using the alternative method. Basically I have to take 5 monitoring report forms (these are sheets that we get on a regular basis where someone usually a peer, reviews our marking work, tells us what they they like and didn't like and suggests improvements), screenshot them and then include them in a Word file with a page of reflection about how I improved my practice as a result of the monitoring reports and what I intend to do going forward to further improve.

My Staff Tutor signs off all these monitoring reports and has witnessed firsthand my teaching and met me in person and is happy with my work so he's the obvious choice for the first reference (doing this FHEA process was also his suggestion anyway so I'm hoping his reference will be positive).

That done and dusted I decided to go look at joining ResearchGate. I don't know if it's me, but I'm not getting it at all. I can't have more than one master's degree (or if they do they must both be of the same type, i.e. both MSc or MA not one of each) so I quit trying to have an Education. Because it is largely work related I joined with my OU email address, at which point it tries to make my OU job my primary affliation. But that doesn't work as the OU are quite strict about non-research staff not claiming OU affliation for research papers - it's one thing for me to put OU on academia.edu as that's where only humanities types hang out, but ResearchGate is full of physicists from the OU who may understandably take offence at my claiming to be one of them - so I really ought to be primarily an independent scholar. But I can't easily add my correct education. So now I look like a wild-eyed crackpot with no academic background and unhinged ideas. (I may also be overly down on myself.) I also can't find anyone. Like, whenever I'm searching via Google for something vaguely HE related I can't help but stumble over ResearchGate threads with people (of varying degrees of sense, knowledge and experience). But now I've actually joined ResearchGate I can't actually see anything. It's an enormous site of nothingness. I thought it would be like Reddit and instead it's like joining Facebook circa 2001 (Facebook launched in 2004, for those not sure what I'm driving at). So I nearly deleted it, but have decided to keep it for a rainy day and the next time I need to track down an obscure paper.