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.