Bringing it home

Fun and games are rife at the moment as we have just had the call ‘advising’ us that Ofsted are in this week to do a full inspection over Wed & Thur. A document circulating internally to calm everyone down opens with this:

“Outstanding teachers continuously reflect on their teaching, they analyse particular aspects of their work and find ways to develop. The main purpose of lesson observation is to provide a focusing tool for reflection and improvement.”

This struck a chord with me and really highlited the value of what were all learning here. I know we are not all working in education, but does that really make a difference?

Basic principals of my study

Here is a bit of an off-beat post to outline the components that I am so thankful for and could not imagine doing my studying / researching / learning without. First up its the underpinning element:

This is the framework on which I do 90% of my work (the other 10% is my learning journal which is a blue lined book, nothing special.) I have been involved in the IT industry for a while and without (hopefully) sounding like a bit of a bandwagon tag-along, Mac OS X has really facilitated the work I have produced so far with its simplistic file management, redundancy and time machine.

I suppose the enclosure for the previous (and all to follow) would be my fantastic laptop the MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo 15″ The best laptop I have ever had. It keeps on surprising me with most things, could not recommend a brand/model as much as this!

This little gem would have to be the secondary framework. Doing a research / distance learning degree would be rather difficult without web access and Firefox allows me to access all I need to on the web with the ability to support plugins such as Zotero.

The common room / lecture theatre / tutorial space and everything else, FirstClass is the University. It brings the Cohort together to engage in a communal learning environment and also allows students to connect with other cohorts, past and present.

Another Apple product now, still not a fan-boy, iWork 09. I have only been using it really in Semester 2, really to try it out. I have had all versions previous to 09 (through site license) but never really ran with it. 09 has really been a saviour for me, alleviating the need for buggy, slow, putrid Office:mac 2008 that I am only using for my reference page for each module as it has interoperability with Zotero, a feature iWork has yet to support.

Oh, now my favourite, Spotify is a service like iTunes that provides all music in its database (around 2-3 million) for free, streaming and instant. See my previous post to see the love!

I suppose this would be another component of the mix. Zotero is a FANTASTIC premise, but not fully developed in my opinion, head over to their website to read all about it and see how it can help you.

Oh come on, not everything is good with hiher education, this is how the descrepancies are dealt with!

What could you not do without???

Workload increment

Okay, so im not feeling too bad about this but looking at the prospect of researching three learning objectives and producing 3500 words conclusively on them all is pretty daunting. Im trying to stay on top of it all and not falling behind and im feeling okay about it. To be honest im really enjoying doing this work as i truly feel that my mind is really being exercised and im learning so much all the time. Lets see how the posts pan out over the next 14 days…

Spotify my mind

Communal, free and revolutionary, Spotify sets out to change everything. Spotify will feel rather similar to anyone using iTunes but with one vital difference. Spotify connects to Spotify servers to stream over three million track from all major record labels for free. The only catch is that you never own the music, but that is also its key aspect to the £0 price tag. Spotify is also almost all server side, so how ever many computers you sign in on (can only be signed in on at one at a time) its always the same, Windows or Mac. Because of the de-centralisation of the whole thing, collaborative playlists are also possible, endless potential and fun. You will have to sign up to register and wait for an invite, but invites can also be given out by current members, I have a few remaining, so leave me a comment if your feeling lucky!

Community involvement at a new level

Now, if your also following the curricular of the BALTR course, you will know all about community participation in the aim of an output, but i have now come across something that brings this now to a new level.

What is being seen with the “YouTube Symphony Orchestra” is communal involvement on revolutionary global scale. Something that hasn’t been done before. I wont blab on, just look at the video, isn’t it fantastic? I might even rake out the violin again and see if i have still got it!