Sweetness

The weekend just past has been one of those so very, very busy weekends with lots of things to do both at home and with work commitments. I've got today off to get some things done at home, to spend a bit of time with the little ones and the likes, I also have one very quick thing to do for work, which I'm getting done while Ella is in school and Oliver is having an afternoon nap. Once I'm done writing here off course. Now I've sat down for this first time in about 72 hours without the intention of immediately going asleep!

All in all though it's not something I feel I can or even want to complain about, it's been a pretty good weekend. Visitors in work, showing off what we do. Family visits, my brother-in-law, one of my best friends and his lovely girlfriend, who is also quickly becoming one of my good friends after only a couple of visits. A small party on Saturday night for said brother-in-law's birthday, all without a hitch, a couple of pints beforehand. Sunday was spent doing a bit of window shopping with my wife, her brother and his girlfriend, she tried on some clothes in preparation for a wedding and hen party later in the year.

The point, I guess, of this ramble is to reflect in a positive way on the nice weekend and indeed all the positive things that go on in my life. Yes, absolutely we have problems and hiccups that we have to deal with, family members in dire straits that we are only equipped to help in the smallest ways at the moment. These problems seem much less dark and deadly when viewed in the light of the positives, the family days, watching my kids grow, my oldest two becoming young women, some family members getting past the harder times into something a bit better, good friends, a job that I enjoy and that provides enough for my family to get by on.

I also have plenty of things to look forward too this year, such as a wedding, a few trips for work, wedding anniversary, birthdays, a good friend coming home from Japan and a bachelor party in Hamburg. It’s going to be a busy kind of year and I’m looking forward to it. I’m feeling pretty good about this year all told, and I’m looking forward to everything to come.

Hmm this has all been a bit saccharine, oh well!

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.

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.

It's a Start

So, I’ve often thought about this whole blogging thing. Like very often. I always say to myself I should start it on Monday or next month, then I get to thinking about what I could write? Why would people want to listen to what I have to say? What do I have to offer? Today, as I was reflecting upon things on my morning commute, I suddenly realised that I was thinking about this the wrong way. Why should I be trying to offer anything to anyone? Why should I worry about what I can write about and if it’s interesting? I came to a decision: I’ll just write about things I find interesting, I won’t write some sort of column blog or try to pick a theme or anything else. Instead I’ll just write for me, sounds selfish but why shouldn’t I use this as a place to reflect? If anyone reads it and writes a comment maybe it will offer me a new perspective, why shouldn’t I just get something out of this for myself?

So here it is, after what is probably the better part of six months of having this blog set up and waiting, idling, taken up space on the internet and not doing anything with it, here’s my first 500 or so words. I’m going to keep a journal here, of my thoughts, what’s happening in my life and maybe, hopefully, a bit of reflection that will lead to positive changes.

I’m a pragmatist, in the philosophical sense. The value or worth of something like an idea or an object is described in the consequences of believing in or using that something. Let’s see what the consequences of this blog will be for me and what its value to me will be as well.

I think I should start by taking a little inventory about myself, what do I think about myself and how do I think about myself, maybe I’ll look back on this at some point in the future and see improvements. Maybe not.

 So here goes, two things I like about myself:

• I am a father and husband, possibly not the world’s greatest, probably not the world’s worst. I make mistakes but I try. I love them in a way I simply can’t put words to.
• I am flexible, I can learn quickly by doing, I improve the way I do things with each iteration of doing it. I thrive in chaos, things do not need to be neat and orderly for me to work, this works well with my wife who is very orderly, she brings structure to our family, I help deal with the unexpected.

Two things I’m not so pleased about

• I am not entirely comfortable with my body, I am usually quite comfortable with it but I think I would like it to be a little bit stronger, a little bit slimmer.
• I’m not the world’s best manager of time, I sometimes become focussed on something to the exclusion of other things, or procrastinate when I’m stressed. Maybe this will keep me on track?

Ok, it’s a start.