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.  

it's 7.30 on a Friday morning, at work just seeing how this works and what it's going to look like. 

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. 

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.

I liked this paper's no-nonsense approach (and it was written in a style I could access easily). Several good bits of content:-

From the paper:-

 The essence of the challenge for all educators in the 21st century is to get the learners to:-

• read more widely
• see more clearly
• think more clearly
• (why am I thinking of the song "Day By Day"?)
• challenge authority on every occasion
• more importantly get learners to challenge themselves

 The aim is to promote the free-flow of information and ideas in the interest of all and to promote a thriving culture, economy and democracy.

 Information Literacy is the ability to deal with complexities of the current information environment - it must

• subsume all the skill-based literacies but not be restricted by them
• not be restricted to any one technology / technology group
• centre around understanding, meaning and context

 So much e-learning remains as e-teaching (the provision of lecture material online) - is this due to poor information literacies amonst the tutors?

 The "information literate" are those who know when they need information and are able to identify, locate, evaluate, organise and effectively use the information to address and resolve problems

 The Australian Information Literacy Standards

An information literate individual has learned how to learn and is able to:-

1. recognise a need for information
2. determine the extent of the information needed
3. access the needed information efficiently
4. evaluate the information and its sources
5. incorporate selected information into their knowledge base
6. use information effectively to accomplish a purpose
7. understand the economic, legal, social and cultural issues around the use of information
8. access and use information ethically and legally
9. classify / store / maipulate the information generated
10. recognise information literacy as a pre-requisite for lifelong learning

I sorry but I found this paper rather dull although it did contain some little gems of information I could use.

Firstly, Barrett attests that most graduates did not have a clear sense of their research aims at the start of the process - they fumbled about and were guided by colleagues, tutors and supervisors. This is so good to hear as I am usually in the same boat. The important thing here is that this is probably when most of the searching of libraries and whatnot occurs - so that searching can at bet be unfocussed and at worst be blind fishing. Without good IL skills the period of fuzziness is probably an awful lot longer than it needs to be.

The second little gem was that most students lack personal collections and substantial subject expertise. Again, I thought I was alone but so many people I have spoken to lack a personal collection or just have haphazard piles of documents in cupboards or piled on desks. From this knowledge I feel I can make best use of the web-based personal catalogues offered by del.icio.us, Connotea, Furl It, Zimbio and the like. All the tools are there - we just don't use them. I shall catalogue all my piles of paper.

Hellfire!

What a paper to start us off on! It was like pulling teeth but I got there in the end I think. A good (content) opener for the course as it provided so much food for thought.

Intertextuality has to exist otherwise we would have to write everything de novo each time - scientific advances would be limited to the lifespan of any one scientist.

Newspapers of ten translate the "official" laguage of politicians and the like into the vocabulary of the the day-to-day spoken word (or rather the newspaper's interpretation of the spoken word). Why do they have to do this? Is it that "official" language is not digestable by the masses or are we losing the ability to understand "proper" vocabulary? I fear I do not know the answer to this!

From the paper:-

 Many non-commodity institutions are being drawn more and more into the commodity model and the matrix of consumerism - they are under pressure to "package" their "commodities" and "sell" them to "consumers".

 Presuppositions (based on prior texts of the text-producers or by other texts) can be manipulative as well as sincere - they are a good way of manipulating people as they are very difficult to challenge.

 A genre is not only a particular text type but a particular process of producing, distributing and consuming that text

 A discourse is a particular way of constructing a subject matter. E.g. Medicine is an area of knowledge constructed from a technological and scientific perspective unlike that of "alternative medicine"

Although this paper was a good read I do feel that it took an awfully long time to say not a lot.

Reading the paper did improve my understanding of sequential and cultural contexts in speech utterances and the importance of considering these when analysing dialogues.

Understanding the relationships between conversation participants helps understand the conversation through analysing the dialogue - are the participants on an equal footing or does one have some sort of superiority over another? This would change the giving and receiving of an utterance.

From the paper:-

 There is no point looking at a single utterance without considering their place in the local sequence of utterances and there is no point just looking at their sequential place if the contextual details are available. Contextual knowledge is a luxury though

 The analyst must know the cultural as well as the sequential rules for the use of certain utterances to correctly analyse the dialogue

I enjoyed this paper a lot more than I thought I would - although it got a bit techie in some areas I think I got a lot ot of it - mainly the highlighting that any discourse is a product of its participants. Those participants bring to that discourse their own expectations and histories, what had led them to have tose expectations, and external influences such as institutional / social policies and discourses.

Reading this paper has made me quite excited about doing some actual discourse analysis. I know I've got a lot more reading to do first but I think I'm starting to understand the complexity of the subject and intend to have a fisrt bash at things quite soon - I think I'll record one of my sessions at work next week and see what I can do about analysing it.

Good things I got from the paper - the actual process

Analysis of the teacher-pupil discourse

• Looked at how the teacher and all of the pupils interacted
• Was there any encouragement / discouragement? What forms did these take?
• How was discourse encouraged / discouraged? Did these change from pupil to pupil / over the time of the study?
• How much did each pupil talk and did this change over the course of the study?
• Was the students' talk "useful"? Did it use the vocabulary of the subject or help others in the class forward their understanding of the subject?

Analysing the teacher's intentions within the discourse

• Why did the teacher behave the way she did in the classroom?
• Where some pupils encouraged / discouraged more than others? If so then why?
• What were the teacher's expectations of the discourse and were these satisfied? Waht are the sources / aspects which have defined the teacher's expectations?
• How controlling was the teacher in the classroom? Did this have an effect on the discourse?
• What assuptions were made by the teacher in the classroom and did these have an effect on the overall discourse?
• Are there any sorts of pressures acting on the teacher which could have / did have an effect on her in the classroom/ If so, how did they manifest themselves?

Alignment of teacher's intentions with policy / institutional discourse

• Did the teacher's actions support the policies of the institution / society or not?
• How did policies and institutional discourses manifest themselves in the classroom and did they affect the classroom discourse in a beneficial / detrimental way?
• Did the teacher manage to achieve or advance the curriculum requirements or not? How? Why?

So much food for thought!

I ended up quite disappointed with this paper - it started out quite well and then just sort of fizzled out and I'm not sure that the so-called paradoxes were paradoxical enough to write a peper on them. I feel that they are more like "considerations" than bases.

The best part of this paper for me was the discussion about the over-romanticising of the idea that the provision of material will overcome the digital divide in some sort of magic way - it will, prpobably, actually increase the divide. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink! Also, so much of the world don't have the basic access so providing them with more things they can't access with help not one jot!

I did like the idea of not just throwing away the old traditional literacies though - use them as building blocks and as an access to the digital / information literacies required in a digital future.

From the paper:-

 Does the possession of multimedia literacy or the lack of it create a new divide between those who have it and those who don't? Will it make those who do not have the literacies into passive consumers of pre-packaged information?

 What is the relationship between traditional literacies and the new multimedia literacies? This question needs to be addressed if those with weaker IL skills are not to be left behind / out

 Competence in traditional literacies are often the gateway into new literacies.

 "We strive towards post-industrial forms of knowledge acquisition" - I hate this comment! It makes us sound as if we have been languishing in some sort of knowledge-poor Dark Age and the industrial age has been over for about 50 years or so - comments like this are way too late!