UniLog 4

Wow, almost a month since the last UniLog. That's going to test the memory.

After my Monday afterschool session out at the Uni on the 17th I had come to the conclusion that it might take a little more work than I'm putting in. The amount of reading is huge! Since I'm still officially on 4 days a week instead of full time due to the PhD deal, I had a quick calc and worked out that I had enough days built up to see me through the 2 days a week teaching over the next 2 terms. I can now go back to 4 days a week for the remainder of the Uni calendar to get some dedicated time to work on the course. Finally settled on the same deal as before, Tuesday and Thurday afternoons off to work on Uni.

20/3 (3h) - First Thursday 1/2 day to head out to Uni. I've noticed it takes longer to get to Uni from Work than it does getting to work from home. Anywhere in Bundy used to seem 15 mins from the beach. Now the city seems larger.

Concentrated on Learning Management to see if I could get through the quizzes as fast as possible. The stuff is really interesting to read, but after 3 hours of flicking through text after text I'm frazzled. I've seen that the average marks on the next quizz are down in the 7's, so it's possibly going to be harder than the netiquette one.

25/3 (3h) - Tuesdays for Design of Pedagogy. 3h goes past pretty quick but at least I've finished off topic 1.

27/3 (3h) - Back to Learning Management on Thursday. I've been through all the readings and am pretty comfortable about the content. I harden up, open a couple of windows on some likely content and pop open the quizz. Some tough question in there all right. There's possibly 4 questions that I wasn't confident about because of the ambiguity. You could easily have 2 or 3 of the answers chosen and think you're right. In the end I get stung on all of them. 6/10. Warning bells time.

More concerned with the ambiguity of the questions rather than dumping marks, I wrote a rationale for my choices and submitted it to the lecturer. I was happy to find that the next day I'd received my marks back on the 2 I sent in. The reasoning being that the quizz was to test whether you understood the content, and writing a couple of paragraphs on each point explaining why one answer should be better than the given one show that I understand the topic. Since it was all to do with the "Knowledge Economy" that I work in day in day out, I knew i was on solid ground. 8/10. Should have written up the other 2 as well ...

29/3 (2h) - Turned up to the Saturday gathering but no-one else was around. Maybe the easter weekend last weekend threw them off. Spent some time trawling the forums and picking up on the progress of others. Bit disappointed in not getting to have a chat I head home early.

1/4 (4h) - Design of Pedagogy is getting more boring. Just seems to be reading and reading and reading. Some of it is Ok, but the Learning Essentials that are supposed to set the goalposts are so flimsy you could interperet them to teach practically anything and demonstrate that you "met the goals". I'll need to see some standard testing to get a true feeling of what level they are expecting. Don't know if it exists here at St Luke's so it's going to be a dive in the deep end. Finished the day thinking that 3-4 hours is my limit without talking to people. I miss lectures ...

3/4 (4h) - Set myself a goal to punch through a whole topic and the quizzes today. in the end I had ~20 windows open with all sorts of stuff I'd read and was pretty happy I had it covered in under 3 hours. Popped open the first quizz and it's all about one document. I'm a little intrigued at dedication a whole quizz to the one document, but since it really defines the "Learning Management approach" that the whole course runs on I guess it one way of stressing its importance. Blitz it 10/10. Next one is a little more spread, but it's pin the fact on the donkey to blitz another one 10/10.

I thought having all the windows open would help me get to the info I wanted, but in the end it was a hindrance. Without tabbed browsing through IE7 or Firefox it was pretty useless organising the windows into an easy to navigate order. I left Uni feeling that I might spend the next few sessions at home where I can control my desktop better and have more screen realestate to play with.

5/4 (1h) - didn't take long for the lazy gene to kick in trying to work from home. We're off car hunting anyway and that's chewing up a lot of my time.

8/4 (0h) - School holidays at St Luke's, but I still lost 1/2 of Monday thinking about cars and checking stuff online. Tuesday turned into testdrive day and we finally have a winner. Toyota Camry Sportivo. Sorry Uni, now I can concentrate more on you.