Personal Blogs

The end of year does this to me. 

I come into it with ideas to achieve a few things, change behaviours, get better, be better. 

I'm forever in my late 20s mentally so I don't give a flip about my age even if others do. There are roles and jobs for people in their 60s and 70s. Volunteer work is a pushover, but being a Town, District or County Councillor requires 'putting yourself out there' and in competitive seats being a 'known as a contributor and pragmatist who gets things done solving problems and dealing with challenges'. I can do this. I do this anyway. 

This can tie in with my interest in the environment and trees, an interest in 'youth' and sports development, my interest in the arts and the power and joy of creativity.

I could have been marking 15 years at the Open University. 

There's a story. We're just back from that part of the world ... almost. I could never have moved the family from our lovely Lewes in East Sussex to Milton Keynes, but we may have forged a new life in somewhere like Banbury. 

Another life, another time. All that counts is the next hour (the introduction to the Project Management Course I have signed up to on Coursera); the rest of the morning on some DIY in our leaky shed/workshop at the top of the garden; a woodland walk (if the rain stops), and hopefully some art (the large pen and ink drawing or relief print I am doing of Dover House, Barton on the Heath before making supper, watching a movie and settling down to a second reading of Ely Green's autobiography 'Too Black, Too White'.

And so a plan is made.

Here's something rare? Something about e-learning, or learning online, or simply 'doing a course online'.

I have done two of them recently, both for Swim England, both a speaker online with a set of slides, Zoom and break out rooms. No assessment included at all, so I could just as easily had the camera off and watched telly. 

Both were show and tell slide presentations, one better than the other, both perfectly informative. I didn't have to take notes, I did. I didn't have to take screenshots, I did. I didn't have to write one of them up on 'How to teach diving', but I did. And I'll write a 'poolside guide' too.

Anyone with enthusiasm for a topic and a nifty line in Slides/PPT skills can teach online. A lesson is a meeting online; we've all done hundreds of those now.

It's no longer e-learning is it? Or even distance learning.

It's why I orientated towards teaching (I have a Cert.Ed) - my first year towards a PGCE, Teaching online is simply a skill that teachers should have in their toolkit. The class could be small, or large, anywhere in the world, and at anytime. A recording and a set of questions in a quiz are easy enough to conjure up. 

Game over? Is the MAODE still taught.

Me? I'm after a course on Environmental Sustainability to go with my Green councillor and activist credentials, maybe something more to keep me up to date on creating and managing content for websites and social media. I attend classes on life drawing and printmaking.