Monday Ramblings

I think disliking Monday is one of those fundamental rights, I just can't seem to ever dislike it though. I kind of like Mondays most of the time, in fact I would say I like or dislike Mondays just as often as I like or dislike any other day of the working week. When I hit I day that just seems to simultaneously drag, not have enough hours in the day and keeps throwing up problem after problem to fix, those days that have what I think is the feel of the traditional Monday Blues kind of Monday that TV loves to tell us about, then I think of that day as a Monday sort of day.

I'm thinking about my research a lot at the moment, when the room is quiet and nobody is talking to me directly my thoughts become filled with all sort of ideas, mostly right now to do with literature reviews and philosophies of research. My lit review has to cover two key areas definitely in the form of Digital Education (specifically online learning, virtual learning environments and webinar type things) and Gifted & Talented education, I probably have to cover Assessment and Evaluation as well, but I'll see how that pans out. Each of these areas is pretty damn big and there are some seminal works that I really need to bone up on.

There's also my leadership assignment as well to think about, I have to pull together an interview schedule, read a few more books on leadership and get some data together for this assignment. I feel, personally, that this will be the weakest of my assignments for this year. Leadership as a field of study is so unbelievably subjective, there are as many theories as there are researchers in the field, plus som researchers have different theories dependent upon the context of the leaders position. It's all very confusing, it's the only area of my Ed. Doc. that makes me pine for the simpler days of physics, with fairly definitive methods to approaching a given problem.

See I've made a shift of sorts in taking up both my current position in work and indeed in taking up my Ed. Doc. studies. I came from a very much empirical background, grounded in Experimental Physics, I went all the way to the masters level in the field. Something felt missing though, I was casting around for ideas for a Ph.D. or even to become a post-primary teacher, but research in science and teaching in the mainstream education system didn't feel right. I had a couple of sputtering runs at getting myself into a couple of different Ph.D. positions, one in Climate Science another in Nanotechnology, but I called off at the last minute.

The financial collapse and start of the recession here left me with a lot of time on my hands as I only had occasional employment as a tutor in the Centre for Talented Youth. This lead me eventually to an admin job there as well as teaching and now I'm sort of a self-taught IT support guy for them, as well as all the other hats I wear. My views now have changed somewhat from the simplistic "Science is King" approach I had always had, I still think that in the fields of medicine, physical sciences and some others that the scientific method is the way to go absolutely, but in the fields of education and social studies I've taken a more pragmatic "right tool for the job" approach, people and their feelings are messy, their interactions are messy too, numbers will only tell me so much, a pointer to what questions I need to ask and if I want to ask questions of people I need to ask them, face to face to get their voice. That's important.

Funny how life works out.

Time's are changing

Today CTYI held a Technology Day for parents, a way for us to share some of the techie things we and our tutors use on a fairly regular basis. We had a good crowd for the day somewhere around 150 attendees in total. There were a few really cool topics covered, my slides centered on the general things available to folks on the web, a quick explanation of open source and creative commons and some bits and pieces I think were important for parents to know about, really I guess it was mostly context for how CTYI uses these things in our courses and content. Slides are embedded below and you can see my speaker notes if you click the gear icon.

My talk was followed by four other, a fantastic Multimedia tools talk that covered GIMP, Pixlr, Sculptris and some other really cool stuff; a talk on App Development and Coding that covered some of my personal favourites such as MIT App Builder, Scratch and general introductions to coding for parents; a talk about a great new web app and soon to be iOS app called Symmetry School made by Spraoi School; and a quick talk about the Gifted and Talented Network Ireland, a support group and community of parents of gifted kids.

All of the other talks were great, really interesting and I came away with some great ideas for some of our correspondence courses and some other cool projects. Overall the whole experience left me with lots of ideas. The idea that's rolling around in my head right now is how the internet has so fundamentally changed what is available to education, things like YouTube offer a wealth of information for students and teachers, Khan Academy provide lots of cool lesson that are pretty entrenched in the flipped classroom and gamification ideals and the likes of edX are making learning available for free to anyone with a connection. That's a far cry from just reading texts and cramming the facts in.

I feel the internet is offering so many ways for us to learn, not just kids, and especially for everyone to create things that help themselves and others learn. So many different ideas are available in creative commons and open source licenses, coding is becoming an essential skill for almost any endeavour,  it's more and more important that people are able to create things for the web to show their portfolios or what have you.

As a teacher, especially in mainstream schools with national curricula and everything that comes with that it must be absolutely daunting. I'm lucky in that I get to use or do just about anything I want when I teach and I'm not bound by many restrictions thanks to our place as an educational enrichment programme. I get to test out all the cool toys and see what combinations work best, I even get to do a whole doctorate on it!

I'm a pretty lucky guy.

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.