Tomorrow's Work

It's the end of the week for most but I have a day in work tomorrow. Mind you I like my work, I work in Gifted and Talented Education, a field I feel pretty lucky to be involved with. I help provide classes to students who are in the 95th percentile or above in terms of one a number of literature supported intelligences. Usually Verbal or Numerical reasoning but Abstract pops up regularly and if a student makes it to us by way of an educational psychologist then they can qualify under a number of different areas. 

Now when I say I work in Gifted and Talented Ed. that's not the only thing we do, we have high ability and non-tested programmes as well, we offer people a way to try academic subjects they wouldn't normally get to look at in mainstream primary and post-primary education in Ireland, it's all about educational enrichment. We also provide various access opportunities to students who come from difficult circumstances. 

So what do I do exactly? Well like most all of us in the office I wear a number of different hats, I do some admin, some course development, some teaching, some programme development and some research, I also take care of most of our day to day IT problems that can be sorted without annoying the general IT dept. 

My real interest though is currently in the research and programme development area. I'm undertaking an Educational Doctorate in Leadership, my main project focus will be on developing a set of online programmes for our students. A set of virtual learning classes they can do synchronously with other students and our staff. I'm really interested in what the internet can do for education and how we can utilise it in our particular field.

This leads me back around to my original point, tomorrow I'm delivering a talk entitled "A whistle-stop tour of techie things" it's a roundup of a few of my favourite areas and ideas when it comes to the internet and education. I'll see if I can make the slides available here tomorrow once I'm done, have to clear that with my employer first. So tomorrow I get to share some of my passions in education, creative commons, open source, wikis and the outline of my own research to name a few of them. 

All of these things are important to me when I teach, there's a whole wealth of knowledge there for students to get to grips with for free. Knowledge, it's the sort of thing that should be free in my opinion. With this comes a host of new problems of course, I think the Mozilla Foundation white paper on web literacies is a great place to start with addressing these new educational issues, it's being put together by Dr. Doug Belshaw, a gent I had the pleasure of meeting a conference not so long ago, go take a look. I guess that's why I don't mind going in on a Saturday, I enjoy it, I feel like I get to do something interesting a get paid for it!

Tonight though? Some beer I think.