Work @ TAFE

Been reading lots lately on other people’s blogs… it’s so easy to get carried away reading while forgetting that one of the most powerful things about blogging is the ability to write and learn.

I’m not sure how other bloggers deal with this, but it just takes me soo much time to process and write about the things that I’m reading! I know that that’s why it’s such an incredible learning process - joining the global conversation - but I seriously struggle to write, let-alone write well… yet another skill I’m trying to learn.

I was comforted recently by Jason Santa Maria’s response to the frustration of constantly having to learn new tools just to keep up:

How are you supposed to get ahead when there is practically something new to consider every time you turn around? Well, you don’t. There are only so many hours in the day. You learn as much as you can and, most importantly, as much as you can retain without drifting too far from your core specialties.Meaning, I love design. It is my specialty and my craft. I can learn how to program Java if I want, but what’s the real purpose? To pad out my resumé? I would rather cut away the fat by trying to be as good as I can at a few things than just adequate in many things. It’s different for everyone though, some people can chew gum and walk at the same time, and some can’t. The trick is finding the balance that works for you and avoiding waking up one day to the realization that you are spread too thin to be useful in any arena.

I love education (and learning) and I love technology… I just need to keep cutting away the fat and focus more on fewer things…

After evaluating and using Drupal over the past month or so as a possible package that could be used to facilitate a collaborative resource development, we’ve ended up going for something simpler and cheaper: A free solution hosted by Wikispaces - check out the beginnings of our resource at http://blendedlearning.wikispaces.org/ - you can even edit/update it yourself - it’s almost as easy as editing a word document!.

Away from Drupal

Drupal is a fantastic open source collaborative development environment, that certainly lives up to it’s name: “Community plumbing”, but there are some inherent drawbacks for our idea of building a simple resource to help educators start using the free and easy tools of the web.

1. It needs to be hosted (costing money). Although James at IncSub has generously given us our own drupal hosting for free… it may not be a great long-term solution if the traffic increases etc.
2. Drupal takes quite a bit of setting up and configuration, which leads to the next point:
3. The medium is the message: We don’t want to use a system to deliver the resource that other teachers/educators can’t easily use for themselves.
4. Drupal doesn’t currently provide a great revision-tracking system of pages, which effectively means that we need to get potential contributors to create an account and login to make any changes to the resource. One of the ingredients to the success of Wikipedia is the fact that anyone can edit a page, without the hassle of logging in.

…And on to Wikispaces

These four points led us back to the excellent free resource: Wikispaces. Wikispaces allows anyone to create their own domain (ours is http://blendedlearning.wikispaces.org/). We can create and edit any number of pages, include pictures etc., all for free. Anyone can come along and improve/build-on the resource with ease - encouraging participation - yet there is a also great revision-tracking system that allows us to monitor the changes being made and revert them if necessary.

So I spent a large part of the past week or so transferring our work to the BlendedLearning Wikispace area. Thanks to Jude Cooke and Ian Bailey for there work on the Blog bar image .

I’m hoping to use a TAFE WSI logo for the site, instead of the default pot-plant, but need to find out a bit more about this. So, for now we now have the beginnings of a resource that can be continually improved and updated by its users. I’ll be using the resource as part of a training activity this Thursday (and, most probably, updating it afterwards with improvements!).

Previous ‘weekly’ reports:

• Weekly report 3 - 5th May 2005
• Weekly report 2 - 21st April 2005
• Weekly report 1 - 31st March 2005
• Initial outline of project idea - 22nd March 2005

We’ve made some good progress with the initial resource: Getting Started with Blogging in Education after some great feedback from a couple of TALO contributors.
All that’s remaining for this initial resource is to update the final page: Where to from here, and create a pdf resource “My Blogger Cheatsheet” for use with the Create your own Blog! activity. It’s been a great experience building on someone elses work (under a creative commons license), rather than starting from scratch!

I’m hoping to have a go at using the resource during a professional development activity on the 19th of May.

After using the resource and incorporating any feedback, it would be great to advertise it a bit to see if there are others who might want to use and/or contribute to the resource. Although we might want to consider whether it’s worthwhile setting up our own site at that point and planning the scope/focus of the site.

I’d like to look at using standard Wiki pages for other resources on the site too (such as a “First steps with RSS”), as it’ll allow resources to be updated much more freely than the current book format. We’ve used the ‘book’ format for this initial resource, as it is very structured and hopefully helpful for newbies, but other resources could be simply a wiki page outlining the best links to, for eg, take your first steps with RSS. I still haven’t had a chance to see if Drupal can support Sean’s idea of a categorised rating system for elearning links… it’s definitely possible, but I’m not sure whether there’s already a Drupal module for it or not… hopefully we’ll get a chance to research this soon!

Over the past few years we haven’t done any specific promotion for our Website Design course here at Wentworth Falls TAFE. I guess during the IT boom of the late nineties/early naughties there wasn’t any need to promote Website Design courses… the demand for web designers/developers was incredible - but that’s not the case now.

There are plenty of people who can “whack a website together” for a small business - and we see examples of this all the time. Much rarer are people who can plan, communicate, design and implement a quality web site, even if it’s only a simple website. But to be honest, small businesses don’t always need a “quality website”, they just want a website with a simple contact form and a bit about the business… and most people have a friend or family member who can put such a website together for them. Larger companies offering Internet Technology / Ecommerce roles are few and far between up here in the Blue Mountains, so my question is:

Who should we be targetting for the Cert IV in Website Design here in the Mountains? Who can benefit most from this qualification?

From the past two years here at TAFE, I reckon I can generalise two or three main roles that the Web Design course caters for at present - maybe you could pick out some more?:

1. those who have a personal project that they would like to implement themselves.
2. those who are wanting to learn Web Design to start their own business.
3. those who are already working in the industry (either in their own business or part of another small business), but would like a qualification.
4. Students who are looking to broaden their options but aren’t really sure of the direction they want to take. (Jude’s additional point)

I’d guess that 70% of our participants over the past 2 years have been those with a personal project. There are still some who are really keen to start their own business, but only two people (that I’ve known) who are already working in the industry and wanting the qualification (or to upgrade/refresh their skills).

What does this tell us? Where should we focus? What type of course should we offer? I’m not certain, but I can think of two directions we could take (or possibly both).

Direction 1
One option might be to publicise a flexible program or traineeship to people in the mountains already working in the industry. There are quite a few small businesses/individuals working designing sites, but it’s obviously a limited number. I think Colin, my Manager, tried this once but came up against some barriers.

Direction 2
The only other opiton I can think of is to publicise/market a flexible Web program not focused on the qualification, but on helping people research, learn, plan, design and implement their ideas for websites/web applications. I only mention this because there seems to be lots of people wanting to do this - it’s not necessarily helping to get people working in the industry and therefore probably not an option unless it was a commercial course?

Any other ideas/thoughts?