Personal Blogs

I'm finally making headway on my FHEA application, yay!

So I thought I'd take this lunchtime to investigate potential freelancing gigs I could use to supplement my income since I work very, very part-time for the OU and there do not appear to be many modules I can pick up (not being a computer scientist).

My husband wants to me restart my tutoring. I'm less keen as before I used to do it from my kitchen table and now my husband works from home. I'd have to do virtual only, which works OK for OU students, but is less easy with schoolchildren.

I keep thinking I could probably start editing again.

The only problem is editing generally makes me ill. Panic attack a day ill. It's been so nice to have spent the whole of 2023 and half of 2024 not having a panic attack because I gave it up in December of 2022. 

Editing is also problematic as it's so concentrated. The 'average' rate is 10 pages an hour to proofread, 5 to copy-edit. That means the typical academic book is a good month's work - as despite even autistic hyperfocusing I struggle to concentrate entirely on one book at that level for 8 hours every day. There's also the issue that as it's so time consuming I can't do editing and marking TMAs at the same time, it simply won't work. Still I can earn more from one proofreading project than I can earn from a year working with one student.

I hopped onto LinkedIn and looked at the skills that are listed under the Services Offered option of the More button and saw grant writing. I have no experience of grant writing, although I have eyed up two grants/scholarships that I want to apply for this coming academic year. So I did a little googling to find out how to learn to be a successful grant writer so that I might be able to successfully win the grants for myself, with, you know, perhaps the future potential to use those skills to offer my services for payment. I found some professional looking YouTube videos about learning grant writing - they're teasers for a woman's online course and community - at a cost of a mere US$500 a month.

Nice work if you can get it.

So is the woman a successful grant writer or is she actually more successful at selling courses about learning to be a grant writer?

Anyway, I'm going back to that FHEA essay and I'm going to see if the OU library has a book about applying for grants. 

I was searching for a book in the online library when I stumbled upon the fact that the OU library has (what appears to be) full access to the O'Reilly learning website including vast numbers of Python on-demand courses, books and videos (link only works for logged-in OU staff and students):

https://learning-oreilly-com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/search/?q=*&type=course&topics=Python

I need to add this resource to the list of Python resources I share in my tutor group forums. If you do visit this, note that in my case the cookies associated with O'Reilly seem to 'break' the automatic logging into the OU website/Moodle/intranet. Nothing a quick cache clear out can't solve, but somewhat annoying.

I discovered that there was a student survey run in May of this year into student perception of online tutorials, the results of which have just been released as an internal report. There's lots to think about and I will be coming back to it a lot as I contemplate how to improve my own tutorials. Several things stood out, there was mention of going deeper than the materials and preparing for the TMAs, the need to avoid it becoming too lecture-like (which is actually easily done if the students aren't chatty) and that they're often tired at the end of a long work-day. This is something I talked about with my Staff Tutor. After some discussion with my husband (a fellow Christian) I'm going to attempt to run all my tutorials next year on Sunday evenings. I know this is going to lose some potential students who would prefer a day of rest on the Sunday. I'm thinking that probably though this day/time will be more beneficial for more students than my normal Tuesday and Wednesday evening tutorials. And personally, Sunday hasn't been a day of rest for many, many years. My husband is a deacon in our church so we always are among the first to arrive at church to set it up (we meet in a school building and have to set up the seating, PA system, Sunday school, creche, refreshments, Bibles and other literature, etc. equipment every week) and always among the last to leave after everything has been put away. Saturday has long been my rest day.

Oh yes, and I have to write that FHEA statement. My mentor and my husband assure me I am 'on it', I feel less convinced and if honest I am struggling to motivate myself to knuckle down and get on with it. I think I need a holiday.

I'm finally starting to get the hang of ResearchGate. Yay, I guess.

But I've hit another snag. 

My paper is going to be trapped behind a paywall entirely for 2 years. Two years after publication I am allowed to make my publication available via my institution repository because the embargo will have lifted. Except I don't have an institution. Which I know sounds weird on an OU-hosted blog when I'm an OU employee, but it's because I'm on a teaching-only contract. There is this thing where I can apply to be like an honorory research fellow or something, but that is restricted to research conducted with the OU itself - so if I published a paper as a result of an eSTEeM project I could apply to be a research fellow - but I can't just apply on my own, I need a reference from an OU-approved research academic saying, yes, this person is conducting research connected with the OU. My research on the history of astronomy and archaeoastronomy is not the 'right' sort of research to get honorary fellowship.

So that means I don't know where to post my paper after the embargo. I'm fairly sure the contract explicitly rejects the option of making it publicly accessible on sites like ResearchGate and Academia.edu (to be honest it's been a while since I signed it so may have misremembered, besides it's not like I can do anything until the summer of 2026 anyway).

So I decided to go hunting to see if I could find some sort of institution that I could affliate with formally that would allow me to upload my research somewhere.

It's not looking great, you guys.

There's the National Consortium of Independent Scholars (yes, they go by NCIS), they seem great. Except I can't join them as membership is restricted to people with PhDs or people studying for PhDs, which is not applicable to me and is basically the reason why I'm doing this whole thing anyway.

Then there's the Ronin Institute. They'll let anyone(ish) in - I think. I'm not sure because they're not letting anyone at all in right now because they've been overwhelmed with new joiners and their website doesn't seem to have been updated since 2021.

Some blogs suggest putting my first draft on arXiv. I can't join. I don't have a PhD. I'm not doing a PhD. I need someone to vouch for my academic and research abilities who is already a member of said arXiv and I do all my academic work alone. I wish to God people did want to work with me, but they don't, they never did (where do you think my social anxiety comes from?).

Then there's IGDORE (the Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education). They'll let independent scholars join them. But you have to agree to publish all your research open source. Hahahahahaha. So it's closed to most humanities independent scholars if they want actual respect for their ideas. My husband recommended I just publish everything on the web and not bother with peer review journals at all. So I'm going to be an unhinged crackpot without even the credibility of being published in a legitimate peer reviewed journal (i.e. not some predatory outfit on another continent).

At this point I gave up and have decided to use the affliation of Gentlewoman Scientist because I now realise I am a throwback to the Victorian age and need to find work that is more appropriate to my crinoline undergarments. Like, every door is shut to me.

Please tell me you do not want want me in academia, without actually telling me you do not want me in academia.

Suggestions? Comments are fully open on this.

EDIT:

I've finally found FIRE UK (The Forum for Independent Research Endeavours UK). I had dismissed them because their page on NCIS says that there is a website coming but not ready yet and they were partners to the NCIS and therefore I probably wouldn't meet their standards. But the website is live (if you google them you'll find it, I'm not linking to them, I'm not linking to anyone in case they tell me to never darken their doors again, I know right, paranoia much - this is what this whole debacle has done to me) and they appear to not have restrictions on entry to non-PhDs. No mention of a repository.

It also occurs to me that my long-neglected website where I keep meaning to provide links to useful open resources, kateblackham.space linked on the right, would serve perfectly well as my 'institutional respository' since my institution is me. That will be my solution.

For Fellowship of Advance HE you need to evidence all 5 Areas of Activity (A1-A5), all 5 Core Knowledge (K1-K5) and all 5 Professional Values (V1-V5).

The way they get us to do these at the OU is to give us a mapping tool (which to me looks like the enormous paperwork files I had to fill in to prove that GCSE and A level textbooks did indeed meet the syllabi and detail whereabouts in the textbooks that content could be found - except this mapping tool is tiny in comparison, a mere 11 pages long) and ask us to briefly state what we've done that meets those criteria in the mapping tool. Then when we have completed that we can use the mapping tool as a sort of essay writing guide ensuring that we include everything we need to say. Then we delete the content from the mapping tool and just say which paragraph of which section in our essay is meant. I've made it sound more complicated than it actually is.

The upshot is I have everything filled in apart from K5: Requirements for quality assurance and enhancement and their implications for practice. Now the PSF standards have changed (to make them so that academic-related staff without teaching duties can have their contributions recognised) so K5 used to be Methods for evaluating the effectiveness of teaching. But I'm hoping that what used to be covered by the old K5 can still apply under the new K5, because I wrote a load of reflective notes during H880, which I'm hoping are still going to be useful.

In H880 the first point at which I can find reflections that map to the old K5 are during week 1 of the 21st century open TEL educator section. We had to do a lesson observation for the assessment of that section and so the reflection was tied to that. I was thinking about the value of being able to watch my peers' recorded lectures as a way of picking up new ideas, new approaches to tackling problems, etc. I wrote a bunch of thoughts in OneNote that I shan't repeat here, but may be worth employing as an example of K5.

I'm marking my students last TMAs before their exam next week and I'm a bit swamped so I wanted to get this down and I'll be brief and this may not make any sense to anyone but me, sorry.

I've had so many students get questions wrong because they're messing up their conversions between km and mm and back. Now I'm lazy and I use my calculator to help me (thanks to a former A level student of mine for pointing out this feature). A scientific calculator has an ENG button for Engineering notation. In SM123 we use scientific notation so we might say 1.982 m where a carpenter would say 1982 mm. It turns out that engineering notation is pretty much the same as astronomical notation. In an astronomy paper you'd say 567 Mpc (567 megaparsecs) you wouldn't say 5.67 x 10² Mpc - you work (in astronomy) in powers of 10³. So lots of kilo, Mega, etc.

Now the nice thing my Engineering A level student showed me was that you can have a random number and press the ENG button and it will move up and down in 10³ steps. Very handy when you want to convert a measurement in km to a measurement in mm or visa versa.

Also, keeping my astronomer's head on, every time I see milli I think 10^-3, kilo is 10³, Mega is 10⁶.

So if you have a measurement, that 1982 mm I mentioned before, I see 1982 x 10^-3 m. If you type 1982 and then x10^x and -3, you get 1.982, which is the value in metres.

Anyway, I used to use Vizualisers (or at least attempt to) at school so I think it's probably not a bad idea to show students some tricks to minimise the errors using techniques in real time in my next tutorial.

SM123 students hate Python.

Every year I have this problem.

Hardly any of them have either paired up for the peer review or requested to do the alternative. Many students are not going to attempt questions 1 and 2 of TMA4.

And then I know what happens - they turn up at their next, more advanced class and they struggle because Python is expected and they were meaning to learn over the summer and they didn't get around to it because their lives got in the way.

There's no judgement from me. I spent most of my computing lab sessions (Fortran back then) crying in the toilets because I couldn't get my code to work. Truthfully, I loathe programming. It is entirely unforgiving. And yet somehow I've spent my entire adult life either teaching programming or editing books and learning materials that teach programming.

The world is mad.

I watched a wonderful lecture recently from a professor who regularly taught programming "How to Begin Thinking like a Programmer" by Andy Harris (youtube.com) (H/T to my student Hazel who shared this in our tutor group forum). He was talking about how the department wanted to move his office and they were trying to get him to get rid of stuff. They wanted him to get rid of his whiteboard. He wasn't having it. Told them he was happy to lose his computer instead. The thing is, the core of being able to program is to think algorithmically. The first thing you need to do is work out what you need to do - in your head, on the whiteboard, using pseudocode like they teach GCSE and A level Computer Science - I know, I've edited ALL THE BOOKS. Only then can you write code. Not before. That's when you make mistakes.

But SM123 doesn't teach algorithmic thinking. It throws them in at the deep end and teaches them to run before they stand.

I wish I could fix it. But I can't. I'm a nobody.

So I tell my students the truth. It's hard. Keep at it. Don't give up. If you think you aren't capable of doing this stuff go play around with Scratch. If 8 year olds can do Scratch so can you. Scratch won't let you break it. Then when your head knows you're trying to do when you're programming, then you'll find Fortran/Visual Basic/Python/whatever-comes-along-in-the-future much less stressful. 

Next year I'm gonna have to try to do this differently - I have no idea how, with no extra teaching time and no extra budget.

I attended a training workshop on incorporating activities in tutorials using Adobe Connect's draw tools last week and want to get my thoughts down here before I forget it all.

For those reading, the OU doen't use Skype, or Zoom or Microsoft Teams, but Adobe Connect. This means we can do collaborative exercises in our tutorials via drawing tools that are enabled for all the users.

They suggest including:

• completing grids and tables
• drag and drop
  
• linking activities
  
• collaborative writing ideas
  

I've been given access to lots of useful template slides. Most of the activities work best with a few students and with really short answers. Right now I can see that a number of the ideas would work really well with my personal tutor group especially in my first tutorial with them. I think including these activities in the module-wide tutorials would be harder - with 40ish students sometimes.

I've noticed, because I generally start by asking students what they've done before in termss of preparation for the tutorial and the study week, and most students turn up not knowing the content at all. This is why so many of the SM123 tutorials (I've seen many of my peers over the three years I've been here, so I'm not just talking about my own) end up being more like interactive lectures, because you can't set the students loose on questions without background as they haven't done the prep work. If I was having the same students every time I could set the norm for what is expected. But each time I run a tutorial I get a completely different cohort - there are 650 students in SM123 and any one of them can turn up to a tutorial of mine (or any other of the SM123 tutorials). This also affects what I can do.

I'm currently in loading mode. Whereby I've got a meeting at 2 pm and cannot focus on anything else as my meeting is really important and I do not want to miss it. This is apparently a common problem for autistics.

I've been thinking a lot about being an autistic university student recently. From my own spiralling because I needed to work with other people, to my own students who are doing yet another pair-up for peer review exercise, to the students in the forum I am moderating who are really cross because the instructions for one of their TMA questions are not clear and are easily and often misinterpreted (especially by autistic students). 

I've been busy and what with a thousand and one other competing demands right now (and I'm autistic, so switching between tasks does not come naturally to me), I haven't got around to reading a book about ableism in academia that I bought months (if not, at this point, actual years) ago, which I am informed has lots of helpful advice on supporting disabled (including autistic) students. There was a really helpful STEMinar last week I attended that was run by the Classics AL who ran the Relaxed Tutorial project. Some of the stuff she mentioned I already do, but one really interesting suggestion was to include a Quiet breakout room as an option. I'm thinking I'm going to need to include a Quiet breakout room whenever I use them and also I really need to let my students know that they can switch breakout rooms (at least I think they can, there was a recent update that updated that capability) in the first Introduction to SM123 tutorial.

I emailed the Samaritans last night, it's been a while since I did that.

I wasn't expecting to feel this way on this project or I'd have done something different.

Basically the unexpected, unintended effect is that doing this project has dredged up all my insecurities about being a friendless loser and a burden and a waste of oxygen and disposable.

I wish I'd never started.

I then I sit here and think, perhaps I shouldn't type this. Who am I talking to? When I started this blog I was talking to the void and making it public just in case it was relevant to someone else somewhere else. But for all I know you're bullies from my past who are sniggering about me on WhatsApp groups.

The truth is I fear the essay I am supposed to write will never see the light of day as I simply don't have enough data or interviewees.

Anyway, I have had some respondents so thank you if you have filled my survey in. I am eternally grateful.

Been thinking about this issue overnight and I want to get my thoughts down before I forget them.

I don't think this is a 'me' problem. I have two tutor groups in SM123. To save work I do a lot of copy and pasting. Therefore all the mass communications and generic forum postings are identical between the two groups. I do indeed have one tutor group that I am struggling to get to interact both with me and each other. But I have another tutor group that is far more interactive - where for the groupwork tutorial I had 4-5 attendees and then a similar number of video watchers.

In some respects I don't really care what students do. They're all adults, they make their own decisions about how best to use their time. I do think a lot of students, especially those who aren't actively seeking social interaction (and hence, I have to say, are more likely to be found in SM123) feel that they have enough to get through just going through the core material - which is excellent by the way. I remember being told as a third year student at Imperial that if I came across secondhand OU textbooks they were well worth buying as they were excellent. The OU actually works hard at constantly improving their teaching materials. If they were very good in the 90s you can rest assured they are now (or should be) award-winning. But I do think that physics and maths students think that tutorials are therefore not important, or at least, less important.

I'm thinking therefore that I really need to get them early. I'm going to rewrite my introductory emails and put up a bunch of stuff on the forums before the year begins about "How to best succeed in SM123". Then totally pivot the first tutorial to the first TMA. All the other (admitedly really important material) can be shoved into a pre-recorded video that can be shared with both groups - a lot of the current material is about 'Welcome newbies to the OU' and not all my students are newbies - at least most of them aren't - and a huge number are studying full-time now so they are probably getting three 'Welcome newbies to the OU' tutorials.

Coming from a physical science background I obviously don't have much experience of the social sciences. Last time I did a questionnaire I was 16/17 and studying GCSE Statistics and for the coursework component I needed to make a questionnaire that I handed out around the sixth form - all of us Statistics people did the same - I filled in soooo many questionnaires during my sixth form. We never sought ethics approval for any of it or had to worry about the implications of GDPR.

It turns out that filing for ethics approval in 2024 requires a tonne of work. I spent much of the weekend stressing over it. The ethics approval form itself runs to 18 pages, then there's the questionnaire itself, the sample interview questions and the participant information form. I finally got my draft versions of all of these finished and sent them to my supervisor very late Sunday evening. He'll get back to me with amendments I need to make relatively quickly and then I shall revise and submit to the university committee for their approval some time in early April.

The unexpected benefit to all this is that funnily enough I can take what I'm learning here and hawk myself out to researchers. Within the OU, we fairly regularly see calls for (paid) assistance running focus groups, transcribing interviews, doing questionnaires, etc. for staff who are running Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) projects. Their projects tend to be quite small and they're running them alongside their regular teaching commitments as a way to improve their own teaching practice and to improve the OU's courses; now the central academics are too busy with their own research to be getting involved in much SoTL so the call tends to go out to available ALs.

... and yet so far.

They really liked me. But someone else is getting the full funding. Would I mind tuition-only?

If I was younger maybe. But I'm in an age-gap marriage with a husband who wants to retire and has started claiming some of his pension and with two kids to put through university.

Money means I don't have to starve or not heat the house.

I've got a few weeks to consider my options, but I'm thinking it's going to have to be a no, sorry.

I seem to have had a big bump in my traffic lately.  👋

If you're here about taking part in my Christian cosmologies project you'll need to wait until after Easter. I have my questionnaire fairly well developed now, but don't have ethics approval to launch it yet. And truth be told, getting ethics approval isn't a priority this week or next as I have an essay deadline.

If you've gotten all excited about my PhD application process, well that's nice, thank you. But who knows how long that will take. I think I was given a date for when the decision would be made but I turned into a human beetroot and it went in one ear and out of the other. They wrote to my referees last week, so clearly the interview did go well. But it still very much depends on who I'm up against.

I got my EOI in for applying for FHEA on Monday. It's another competitive process with only 80 places per cohort. Which sounds like a lot, but when you have literally thousands of ALs like me teaching the modules, and then all the central academic staff who wrote the materials, well there's often oversubscription (which was precisely why they brought in the EOI process - it's new for this cohort). I talked about my postgraduate certificate in online teaching (via the OU's H880) and about how I support students, using fancy terminology I'd picked up from the PGCert OT. So that's another waiting game as well.