OER infoKit – Open Thinkering

Weeknote #7

Posted on June 26, 2010 by Doug Belshaw

This week I have been mostly…

Out of the office

I spent the grand total of about 2 hours in the office this week due to a combination of travelling, attending a conference, and taking some annual leave. I always forget to put my ‘Out of Office’ autoreply on…

Launching the OER infoKit

I mentioned this week that I launched the Open Educational Resources infoKit at the Higher Education Academy Conference. The launch itself was a bit of a farce. I had no microphone and the other half of the enormous sports hall was being used for badminton. #professionalism #fail

Marking GCSE History exam papers

I mentioned last week that I’m marking again for Edexcel. The standardisation was abysmal, but marking isn’t all that bad. It’s a whole lot more efficient doing it online rather than on paper and being able to take some annual leave to get it done takes the pressure off! 🙂

Spending time with Nick

I do enjoy it when Nick Dennis comes up to our house stay for a couple of days. Not only does he avoid rolling his eyes when I get all philosophical about education, but we usually hatch up plans and projects relating to educational technology. He’s up in Northumberland for the Cramlington Learning Village conference. With his iPad. Of course. :-p

Weeknote #6

Posted on June 19, 2010 by Doug Belshaw

This week I have been mostly…

Attending #cetismob

I was down in at the University of Bolton at a mobile technologies event hosted by JISC CETIS. Mark Power did a great job at making sure it was a relaxed affair with really quality sharing and networking opportunities. Well done! 🙂

Delegating

It was the home stretch this week before the launch of the Open Educational Resources infoKit I’ve been working on since I started at JISC infoNet. So there was plenty of delegation to do, especially to Lou McGill, who’s worked tirelessly and to a consistently high standard on it!

Getting back to my productive self

My productivity took a hit after my indecisiveness over the Dell Streak. Now that I’ve settled on it, I’ve learned my lesson in terms of making my mind up and sticking to it! Turns out every decision I make is a productivity decision…

Starting marking scripts

Ever since I, along with a few others, was recruited during my PGCE course at Durham I’ve marked History examination papers for Edexcel. I used to do AS Level Russia, then they moved me to AS Level Germany, and this year I’m marking GCSE Germany.

I’ve got absolutely no problem with the online marking system itself: it’s quicker than doing it on paper and suits me. Of course, I’ve got to virtualise Windows XP on my Macbook Pro so I can use Internet Explorer 6 and some proprietary software, but that in and of itself is no big deal.

What really winds me up about Edexcel is their organizational inefficiency and the general lack of anyone knowing what they’re doing. The emails they send out force you to spend half an hour figuring out what they mean and, of course, not understanding means you are obviously morally or organizationally deficient in some way. Gah.

The sheer horror of the obviously-doing-it-to-save-costs online standardisation procedure could be a whole other post in itself, but I’ll spare you that. Suffice to say that, given my experience yesterday (for which I took annual leave) and the fact that I’m not teaching History at the moment, I’ll not be marking for Edexcel again in the near future!