digital lifeboat

Christopher Sessums (if you do not read his blog weekly you are missing a deep well of resources) reflects on

So what are you blogging for? Why is it your business to blog? (Pssst… pass it on.)

http://eduspaces.net/csessums/weblog/339519.html

So I thought I would look back to my first blog post, two years ago.

I started blogging to ensure that my “notebook” was on line and accessible everywhere. It seemed to me that if I was going to study on line I should where ever possible work on line.

I then got interested in reflective writing and reflection as part of the learning cycle. A new concept to me and a missing link in my personal development particularly in my work.

The next phase was moving from a personal journal in an institutional VLE plus personal blog,  to joining an online community and the cross fertilisation of ideas from commenting and reading other blogs.

So where now for this blog at the end of the second year. Why is it my business to blog?

The learning journey is not over and the reflective process is embedded in my routines now. The resources of the past two years are readily accessible in my “digital lifeboat” and ready to be mined again in the future when needed.

It is now a significant part of my learning process. The video on Sessums post above gives lots of good reasons why blogging is a process of personal self discovery. Bloggers speak of their compulsion to read and comment on the reflections of others. One talks about self disclosure and privacy. Another of learning from their students reflections on them.

I think one of the greatest appeals is that it is a creative form of communication. This semseter I have made little effort to augment my blog with video or graphics. That is something to develop in the future

 The final course activity for this unit is to

“Write short summary on “project management in an eLearning environment”

Lots to sum up and I am going to come at this subject from different angles.

Strategic thinking and planning.

It is clear that there is a lot of work in formulating a strategy for an E-learning project. I think that Don Morrison’s book did an excellent job of laying out all the issues. It was also a very readable and inspiring book, destined I hope to be a guide for the future.  I used his structure to form the basis of my report. 

Project Management

This must be a very challenging issue when managing a large team working on different aspects of the development. It is difficult to reflect accurately on this from the micro level. As I stated at the outset I am used to managing a very small team of three. I think I have learned from the experiences of others in the group the difficulties of drawing information out of a large organisation. This has been rather sobering in comparison with my organisation who seem much more transparent by comparison.

One of the things which I have discovered in this process, though looking at effort estimation, is how expensive good learning materials are to generate. I did a costing exercise for delivering my strategy and found that that it would pretty much take me the equivalent of my current part time job to deliver the project in a year. I knew it would be costly but not how much. This sets more of a context to the impetus to re use content, and to accurately catalogue resources.

 Another aspect, the effort estimation and planning for the report writing. I gained time by writing long posts on the weekly topics, which then formed the body of the report. This spread the effort evenly across the semester much more successfully than in the previous three units. It is clear that time spent planning effort and sheduling is well invested.

 I learned a lot about managing change particularly aspects of communication. It seems to me from my understanding of projects we have studied, that delivering a project in increments is a good way of building confidence within an organisation where cultural change is required

I think I have mentioned elsewhere my new found addiction to SWOT and TOWS analysis as a form of mental relaxation rather like doing crosswords! Rather like my discovery of enjoying blogging and reflective writing in previous semesters.

In truth I found that I was already able to think in a strategic manner without using the matrices, and comparing my thoughts with a later structured analysis arrive at virtually the same conclusion.

I have enjoyed this semester. The emphasis on strategy, planning and report writing was relatively easy for me by comparison with the previous large website projects.

So that as they say is a wrap. The report is written and will be delivered during week 12.

I am working on a summary to be delivered to school. That is quite a challenge in itself and will take some time, fortunately I have a couple of weeks in hand to work on this.

Feeling past the peak of activity last week and a bit jaded. Have a long weekend to re charge as well as get the final activities sorted.

 The report needs to loose a further 280 words. It’s a big challenge to get the word count down a tough ask to cover the ground in 6,000 words.  I have moved large chunks of content into the appendices.

My report majors on the drivers, and vision for the project.  My aim was to make this project as real as possible, and I felt the case needed to be made to engage all the stakeholders as my organisation is totally new to E-learning. At the time I started I did not really anticipate that the school would take up the challenge. Now I know at least it will be read so that’s an achievement.

I think I have thought through the issues enough to put the project into action in reality if necessary. I still need to make some effort estimations,  and calculate budgets, but that will have to go into the appendix while I hack away at the Vision section.

 One aspect which has emerged in the research side is that there is evidence that the E-strategy as applied to schools stands at a crossroads with regard to funding. The baton is being firmly placed into the hands of schools for them to take the decisions at local level, where a number of conflicting priorities mean difficult decisions ahead.

 The scrapping of the ring fenced e-learning credits could not have come at a worse time. We need to populate our VLE with effective learning resources, and we cannot afford the time to generate them ourselves. Subscriptions to online content, and renewals of contracts for software support are under threat. A huge industry has grown up on the back of the e-learning credits system providing software for school. I would like to see suppliers responding to the challenge that school now face by reducing their subscription costs, and facing the reality that schools will not be able to afford to sustain their prior investment in software from now on.

A the local level, in a year when the school is focused on a new building project we are gambling on a bid for additional funding coming in to cover the cost, and therefore sustain the school budget. I have had to plan for a cut of  20% in the IT budget compared with last year. If the bid fails, it will be a very difficult year.

At the same time as funding is dropping, the level of coercion to demonstrate a return on the ICT investment is being increased with parents being encouraged to challenge schools on what they have achieved. Becta have been charged with leading this “campaign” to force schools to evaluate the effectiveness of their use of ICT.

http://www.nextgenerationlearning.org.uk/

Two presentaions for group work this week. Working in a pair to lead a group is very challenging as I found last week. The pair presenting this week lost the ability to communicate privately in the chat room. This was an almost impossible hurdle to overcome as mind reading is not yet a function of the human being. Still it was handled with flair by the leaders, and not a little amusement buy the rest of the group.