Another Week...

I've been so lax in not updating this site. Then, when I finally get chance the browser and my stupidity consign the post to digital oblivion.

On the teaching side the Cisco courses are coming along, though I'm concerned about the two students who are starting to fall back slightly. One took a long break and the other has had trouble with binary maths and subnetting and neither have completed Semester 1 yet. I've been patient, I realise that they are both very busy at work, but if I don't start cracking the whip soon it could begin to affect the other students.

I also took did some electronic whiteboard training this week. I was disappointed by the lack of people the would get up and use the board. I guess I need to be more pro-active in encouraging student participation, but I'm aware that they may be like me and hate to be called up in front of others. Still my compromise was to offer short 10 minute refreshers to them when they had presentations ready to deliver.

I'm also not very good at questioning students and getting them to help with the learning of others. I don't do it frequently enough, though when I do I find that the silent strategy does work - leave a long enough gap and someone will fill it! I think I also need some other strategies though. Back to the books.

On the learning fron the first MA session was on Asignment writing - still useful even though I've done a similar session 3 times now - there's always a new idea or thought that comes out.

The second session was the beginnings of the course proper - "managerialism and organisational types". The group work was very useful in seeing how others perceive their organisations and made me think a bit about how I see my organisation.

The second half of the session looked at organisational types and we were asked to draw a picture (NOT a diagram) of how we saw our organisation and its structure. I think this was a little like therapy for some, but I found it a little hard to come up with a pictorial version of how I think and feel about my organisation. The best I could come up with was a gunfight with the different parts of my organisation vying for power and with external influences constantly pressuring us.

I still can't draw though.