Wednesday, July 20

It's Summer Time . . .

. . . and the livin's expensive. School's out so precious few trips to Dunstable for a while. Any day now I'll find out whether we've got a new house in MK. That'll mean selling this one sooner rather than later which is a great pity but it's probably the only way that I'll ever get my finances straight and have some sort of plan for looking after Mum & Dad.

First half of the year has flown by, with both LSDA and College throwing all sorts of jobs at me. The LSDA report got done, accelerated by my discovery that it was virtually impossible to conclude anything from the data I'd been provided with! All to do with how people respond to questions in a survey and in this case it seems that some thought the numbers 1-5 were in ascending order of something and others the reverse! The other task was to create a sort of self-assessment tool which people could use to figure out where they were in terms of meeting some e-learning standards and another one that would show where an institution stood in terms of its 'maturity' in adopting and utilising e-learning. Working with a colleague from the North we made a good stab at it once we'd figured out what we thought was required. Then the shape changed, and again and now it's turning into something likley to be linked to an e-learning professional development framework or qualification! We've almost given up. Whilst it could be really interesting, after the 63rd set of questions we drafted still seemed to miss the target we're both losing the will to live and so unless we can get paid to carry on we'll probably not get much further.

Interestingly, I went to a Centre for Excellence in Leadership training event a while ago and was presented with almost exactly the same tool to use as we'd developed earlier and which we'd been told needed refinement! Amazing. I now expect to see one of my earlier versions of the other one as a 'finished item' at another event in the future!

Tried to get a new web site together for the area I work in but without success. Once the Marketing Director left my College, however, I was able to get agreement that we needed a new site there and I'm presently working like mad to get that in a reasonable shape to launch in place of the awful thing we had before. A young lad who's good at all the code stuff is working for me and doing pretty well but it's going to be a close call as to getting it all there in time.

Here in the village there's going to be a repeat of the brilliant Party In The Paddock in August. That should be fun.