Personal Blogs

A dire online session where participants were supposed to have completed some homework beforehand. Out of 7 attendees one had done so, 2 said they had looked at it and of the other 4 a further 2 said they weren’t sure the course was for them and left.
The lesson from this > don’t give homework before a course has even started. Not even as a teambuilder. Maybe get people to fill in a profile at most.

Good practice online is to have two people. If you have the luxury. The second person works as a ‘two hander’, or helps with sign ins in the background if people are meant to have access to an App or platform, they can also filter and offer up questions that may come up in the Chat rather than having the speaker distracted.

Alternatively, set the ground rules early so that people don’t have expectations of anything in the Chat being dealt with until the end. John Sowash of the Google Academy is great at this. 

Dearnley's paper (Dearnley, 2003) considers the support required to aid Enrolled Nurses (ENs) to become Registered Nurses (RNs) and the necessity to run open learning courses given the demand created in 1987 when the EN role was to be phased out.

The ENs were:

• practising nurses
• most had family and home commitments
• few had any substantial academic qualifications

(it would be useful to know how far they had taken formal education, to GSCE/O'Level leacing school at 16 I guess?)

There were, in Dearley's words 'existing life responsibilities and events." (Dearnley, 2003)

MORE TO FOLLOW!

(Just been handed the final 'birthday list, edited by my wife, for my son who is 12 at 3.23am tomorrow morning and will no doubt be up to celebrate the moment. As I delivered him (with some help from my wife) it is an important memory for me too ... long story, but our Midwife was 45 miles away and turned up 35 minutes after the event ... an ambulance arrived 10 minutes after the event and said 'you seem to be doing fine' and went off and made themselves a cup of tea).

Oh joy.

"Emergency Home Birth" in the book we had was a chapter, but also for those in a real emergency a half-page check list. Guess which I used? Scissors, string, hot water and towels come to mind! And what to do if the umbilical chord threatens to throttle your child ... just as well, it nearly did, so I at least knew how to disentangle this Japanese knot-weed come power cable ganglion of rope).

There's a picture of father and son asleep, him on my chest, about an hour later. My wife was in the bathroom with the Midwife taking a bath and ensuring that the placenta made an appearance.

An 'event' to say the least.

(Six hours later I was in the West End of London presenting the final cut of the conference opener for the launch of the European Stock Market. It NEVER crossed my mind however to call my son 'EASDAQ' !)

WHERE WERE WE?

Dearnley can wait ...

'Flexible learning with technoliogy can offer opportunities for improving the quality of students learning experiences and for meeting the needs of students in more appropriate ways. The challenge is to keep options open and allow space for exploring what is possible within a framework of appropriate support.'

REFERENCE

Kirkpatrick, Denise. International Journal for Academic Development, Nov2001, Vol. 6 Issue 2, p168-176, 9p

(accessed 28 august 2011)