In February of this year the British Council sent a rather frazzled Academic Manger to London on the Management Development Programme Level 2 (leveling up in the British Council isn’t half as fun as World of Warcraft , incidentally - but it does serve the same purpose: you get access to cool new skills, the chance to do battle with more fearsome monsters and it opens up new realms for you to explore.

Most of the content of the course is forgotten (accreditation, performance management, recruitment blah blah blah) but one day stands out as we visited international house and looked at* their moodle courses.

This was a turning point / epiphany / breakthrough for three reasons.

1)       I stayed awake AND paid attention for the whole session because the moodle platform is not dissimilar (at      least from the perspective of the admin control panel) from my IPB discussion board, so suddenly the world came into focus and made sense – I was hearing useful information.

2)       it made me wish I had applied for a job with IH instead of the BC and

3)       It gave me the desire to learn something new.

So (in a roundabout way which involved lots of course-googling and option-pondering) here I am.

I see the M.Sc in E-learning as a chance to combine what I love with what I do.  In my free time I am webprolfic: I engage in text based role play games, have my own online community (with a shiney new wiki), I blog and also appreciate the blogs of others and I spend far too much time on facebook.  I love it, it excites me.

What I do is teach English as Foreign language (actually I use this phrase as it is familiar however it is terribly unfashionable now – we prefer the term ESOL: English for Speakers of Other Languages).  Or more accurately I manage the teachers.  I currently manage a small (15 teachers) British Council outpost in Northern Thailand.  It is lovely and slow-paced and it is boring me to death.  Yet even here we have Interactive Whiteboards and a 10 computer self-access centre – the provincial Thai kids who learn with us are a thousand times more technologically savvy than the (predominantly) middle aged men who teach them.

I love my job but I sometimes feel it stagnate around me.  Not just being here but being part of a huge slow moving behemoth of an organization like the British Council.  By the time we commit to a change the change proposed has become an anachronism.  Yet it is our organizational commitment to be a world authority in teaching English.

I wonder how many organizations are like us? Aspiring to a world they don’t really understand, with a board of directors (in our case the British government) who believe that bringing their people into the 21^st century is simply a matter of teaching them a few new key-strokes.  When what is needed is a profound culture change. 

This is the crux of my concern – not only for the course but also for my (potentially) new career.  That there is too much to learn, our aims are too wild, we want too much and yet we don’t understand whether or not it will be good for us.  That we will fritter away resources on technological white elephants while there are still children (just down the road from me) who don’t have notebooks and pencils.

I want to get involved because I love the new technologies available to us, I believe in them, as agents of change socially as well as educationally – but I also want them to be used ethically and sensitively and with a deep understanding of the user behind the interface.

* When I say we went to international house and looked at their moodle courses I must confess that is all we did.  Their server was having an emotional event and so we couldn't access the course online.  So we looked at screenshots on a powerpoint.  This is an illustration of the gulf between our aspirations and our reality.  This gulf (which on a bad day is almost a dichotomy) could probably be a module in itself.

Clara: "So what sort of things are you hoping to get out of the MSc?"

There is a social networking website called 43 Things where you make an account and list goals, read the goals of others and offer encouragement (which may or may not lead to marriage and children presumably).  It is pretty cool, for at least five minutes as many things on the interweb are.

A glimpse at the world's goals 24th Sept 2008 11.30 pm shows that, collectively, we want to: 

watch Stargate SG1 / make others proud / wear skirts more often / control my anxiety / create a programming language / go  to law school / find a job / Lose 15 more pounds / create a permaculture garden / build a excellent piece of furniture out of wood  /write and publish a novel / travel / forgive / be a spy / learn to love myself / create a newsletter / Read "The Magician's Nephew" (Chronicles of Narnia, book 1) / make all A's / Be a better friend / Build a bar in my basement / pay off my student loan / Skydive

Deep stuff!

Funnily enough on 21st March this year I created an account and told the world I wanted:

• to get my tongue pierced
• to do a Masters
• to learn about Moodle, and..
• to do yoga regularly

Well it was a good start, but something good must have come on the telly then (Stargate SG1 perhaps) and I never completed the other 39 things so I will try now.  Incidentally of the above 4 I am only holding Edinburgh Uni responsible for 2 & 3, I'm not expecting piercing services or asanas in a later module.

So Clara to answer your question my goals over the next three (or four) years are:

 My (MSc E-Learning) Life List

1. get my tongue pireced  

2. apply for a Masters  

3. learn about Moodle (and other VLE's)

4. do yoga regularly  

5. meet new people  (interestingly I share this goal with 3,786 other people)

6. inspire my teachers to be enthusiastic about technology  

7. blog regularly  

8. feel proud that I have done my best  

9. make a vodcast (thanks Kevin for the new word)  

10. find the money to pay for my very expensive masters  

11. make a podcast  

12. be more inspired  

13. make the most of the wealth of diverse experience that surrounds me  

14. share learning  

15. learn new skills that will make me employable in the US  

16. pass on my learning to my organisation  

17. learn about smoodle  

18. surprise myself  

19. fall in love with being an educator again  

20. get another tattoo  

21. be excited by discoveries  

22. share my strengths with my fellow adventurers  

23. innovate  

24. learn new skills that will make me employable in a broader context than EFL  

25. feel passionate about learning and teaching  

26. see the cybercultural bigger picture  

27. get comfortable with html  

28. get married  (me and 15,757 people, phew!)

29. learn from the strengths of others  

39. make wise decisions about which courses to choose  

31. ask for help when I need it  

32. get a new job  

33. network without fear or embarrassment  

34. have as little to do with assessment as possible 

35. find out how to use second life for more than sex and shopping  

36. explore motivation and buy in  

37. ponder personas and masks  

38. make skillful (and fun) use of my digital camcorder  

39. make a positive contribution  

40. understand how to make a difference to learners' experiences without being in the same room as them  

41. think of a stormin' thesis topic  

42. unite what I love and what I do once more  

43. succeed  

Concerns... tomorrow. 

This is easy.  Money.  I can't really afford to do this as an overseas student, but I wanted to do the course so bad that accepting the overseas status only choice I had, so I take step one hoping I can pay for the second step when the time comes.

Nothing else really worries me.  I understand there might be worries, workload; interaction; pressure; learning new skills etc. But I can manage those.  The nature of online study doesn't phase me, it is who I am in a sense. Only the financial aspect is out of my control so only this worries me.

But it will work out. These things always do.  

I thought I would post a little pensee that anticpates next week's discussion topic.  In the Northlands, the online community I run with my partner we are both administrators.  We have the same ideals and beliefs for the community - but we go about 'facilitating' those ideal differently.

I am interventionist.  If something is wrong or someone is behaving inappropriately I deal with it, often publically.  I have deleted posts, whole discussion threads - taken away people's posting rights, and even taken away moderation and admin powers.  These actions are usually accompanied by a private message to the involved parties, explain what I did and why. 

Dom on the other hand tried to nudge people in the right direction by posting with them publically.  He behaves like a 'regular' member of the board and tries to reason, in the context of the discussion or, as if often the case, argument.  He will at the request of another member delete offensive posts.  But it is always in response to complaints, and never because his own sense of (in)justice prompts him to take action.

At work I am the academic manager and my senior teacher is a guy called Manjit.  I manage people at work in a similar way to how I manage people at The Northlands.  I deal with them directly, getting to the core of the issues that are causing inappropriate behaviour.  I talk to teacher x about his anger, and teacher y about her depression.  I tell them my concerns about how I percieve it is affecting (or may affect) their performance.  In cases of extreme underperformance I give people the chance to change and if they don't I put them on a perfomance plan, take away a post of responsibility or in extreme cases ask them to leave.

Manjit is like Dom, much more subtle.  He manages underperformance when has resulted in a complaint from a student or some other concrete outcome (i.e. a covering teacher hasn't been able to plan a lesson because the main teacher hasn't completed their admin fully).  He will grumble and worry, but he will not hand the teacher the responsibility for changing their behaviour until he has external evidence which he can take to them and ask them to explain, justify and ultimately correct. 

It is easier to reflect on the actions of others than oneself but if I were to try and analyse these different management styles I would say I see myself as a guardian of the people whereas Dom and Manjit are guardians of the process.