Sharing Skills

The beginning of a new academic year justifies a few bold and ambitious steps.

The first one I have taken is to start cleaning up my digital footprint with a consistent, trackable username. This blog post is also the first to appear at its new address, LLLearning, where I hope to exploit the ever-expanding potential of blogging software to build a complete virtual home for my rather extravagant range of activities. An earlier title, Life Longing Learning, relates to a little epiphany regarding lifelong learning that I will articulate here as soon as I can boil it down to words.

Another bold and ambitious step I am taking this year is to actively share my skills in the workplace and beyond. Now the more I learn the clearer it becomes that I am no education or technology guru. Yet I am often struck by how what seems a simple little tech trick to me can create a revolution for someone who may not know of it. An obvious place to start sharing these skills is the workplace. Colleagues can be an intimidating audience, but shared knowledge can have great value for them individually, and also for workplace morale. Not to mention the personal growth the presenter gains from the experience!

In the coming semesters I will be presenting monthly workshops on simple elements of optimising accessible technologies for teaching at my college. I am also setting up a wiki where teachers can list and evaluate resources for English Language Teaching. This should simplify the task of our existing E-Services committee, whose work has been buried in an impenetrable labyrinth of folders in the past. Another project I look forward to reporting back on is a voluntary resource site for my students – a sly little experiment using Google Analytics to unravel students’ true online habits. Of course resources for all of these projects will appear on the new superpowered blog!

Of course this provides a wealth of fodder for not only blog posts, but also a few short articles and presentations. It also allows some time for building up a stronger theoretical background and looking into further research.

At the very least, it should keep me out of trouble. 

Image: Change Your Mind by Marie-Therese Le Roux

Planning for a New Academic Year

After a generous summer holiday nothing feels quite as good as getting back to work. This new academic year is quite special: now that my studies are completed, I have the luxury of time and the choice of what to do with it.

But time that is not spoken for has a way of slipping away. This is why one of my first tasks for the semester has been to set up a spacious wall calendar, while keeping track of daily commitments on my phone's calendar. The reasoning is that by considering time, I will not be a slave to it. Worst case scenario? I feel guilty about unheeded reminders. Which is far better than forgetting.

For a wall calendar I used the easy and flexible free download from PDF Calendar. This is a user-friendly interface that produces a simple yet elegant calendar. Most importantly, it allows you to choose the first day of the week. This is vital to anyone living in Oman, where the week starts on Saturday!

As to my phone calendar, I use the native calendar app on my Android-based Nexus One. Android's calendar is designed to sync with Google Calendars, where I tend to diarise events while online. Syncing eliminates most of the headaches that can be caused by keeping calendars in different places.

The problem with planning is, of course, that life happens. As far as I am concerned, this is exactly what planning is for. By being organized, it is possible to stay on top of things. This means that when an emergency – or an unmissable opportunity – comes up, abandoning the plan is not a catastrophe. Does planning jeopardize freedom? I think not. Even constant spontaneity can become a tedious routine.

For now, I am happy to spend some time planning. What the plans are, well, that remains for a later post...

Image: katarzyna24