I am about to embark on a new venture. I will be teaching NCFE level 2 with a group of teaching assistants for a few hours a week. It’s exciting and daunting at the same time. It’s an opportunity to put into practice all my constructivist ideals and my commitment to web 2.0 but it’s going to be a challenge. I’m putting all my teaching materials online in the Teaching Assistants area of usefulwiki and I hope to attract other UK based TA trainers and students to get involved.

Like the web head I am the first thing I did was ask round in the TA forums for people’s impressions and experiences of the course. I got lots of helpful advice and encouragement and a great book list! However one of the main thing that they agreed on was that sometimes the tutors ‘waffle on’ about things that don’t seem very relevant to the evidence based assessment criteria. This instantly rang bells for me. I could be wrong but this may be a case of surface versus deep learning. The TAs want their ‘bit of paper’ and as stressed, busy people, they want to achieve it by doing ‘just enough’ work to get them through. The tutors though have other objectives, they want to produce rounded, competent TAs who are reflective about their work, apply theory to their practice etc. Is this starting to sound familiar to any one? Especially people at Ultraversity?

I have no idea how to resolve this at the moment but I think the key is in carefully structured assessment assignments that encourage a reflective attitude without overburdening the students. Oh, and finding a variety of ways of providing evidence for meeting the assessment criteria. Time to put the money where the mouth is! Watch out for a batch of blogging TAs!

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I used grounded theory again, coding raw data into emergent categories but this time linking to theory where possible as well. The main categories soon became clear this time with a number of sub-categories under each one.
Andy offered some critisism of the method, suggesting that it was overly time-consuming. I defended this on the grounds that I was learning and making connections whilst doing this. Paying such close attention to what has actually been said draws out meaning and makes it clearer.
Now to draw some conclusions from my analysis, have the actions of the first cycle moved me nearer to the values I began to identify in the assumptions stated in the research proposal?
What should I be questioning in my double loop?
Then on to make plans for actions for the second cycle.

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OK, I decided in conversation with Andy that I would analyse the data I have so far for my first cycle. I’m going to do this tomorrow. Any more data that comes in after this will reflect further actions so belongs to the second cycle.
SO today is for deciding how to analyse the first data set. Do I stick with grounded theory? It worked well for the pilot producing useful insights from a fairly small sample. Or do I use something like Gibbs? Or even a reflective splurge?
First thing is to marshal the data and take a first look at it. Then I think a reflective walk to mull over the options.

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I did a comparison between Blogger and Edublogs.Despite a few technical issues Edublogs was a clear winner for my purposes. My blog there is aimed at education practitioners and being part of that community makes sense. I also like the fact that James so obviously cares about what he’s doing . He tries hard to resolve issues, unlike the impersonal blogger interface. Also I like using wordpress, I use it here for my research blog. It’s a bit of a pain not having access to edit the style sheets like I can here and I miss being able to have a flickr badge, but other than that it’s pretty good.
So when problems with using Firefox 1.5 happened I shouldn’t have been surprised at James’ swift response:
Problems with Firefox 1.5
Hmmmm, seems like users who have upgraded to FF 1.5 are having some problems posting to their blogs. Am on holidays at the moment but will do my best to sort this out asap, in the meantime IE will work (never thought I’d say that!)
Nice man
Actually Safari works ok too - so I’m using two browsers again, sigh!

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Found the Art Guy had added new video to his Flickr photo stream. This one shows how to use origami to make ’star books’. It’s quite tricky and using video adds a lot to the ease of understanding how to do it.
Implications
Another argument for changing the name of the classroom displays group and blog to displays and makes.
Issues about pointing to his blog though, a link in the sidebar of the Classroom Displays Blog perhaps?- hmm
thoughts - moving the displays to the blog ‘puts what is inside the community on the outside’ - find ref from Andy

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I’ve got James Falmer commenting on here assuring me that I can add a Flickr badge to my links area on the edublogs blog and to have a play :-). I’m struggling to see where to put it. I can’t edit the stylesheet like on the blogger one - that was fairly straightforward. So I wonder where I am supposed to put the html code? Oh there’s a thought, perhaps it works better with the Java one. My several attempts this afternoon haven’t worked. So far I’ve learned:

I have got the blogging direct from Flickr sort of working now, but it shows some of the html above the image which I then have to edit out from the blog - thus rather defeating the object.
Still I am leaning towards the Edublog:

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This week is down in my research plan for taking the first action phase of my research. I was worried that I was just ‘messing about’ with making a blog for the Classroom Displays group. Well, actually two blogs both called Classroom Displays one on James Falmer’s Edublogs site Edublogs and one on Blogger.

I wanted to see how they compare for ease of posting, style, ease of linking etc. Originally I thought I’d have to find a blog that would make it through the LEA Smartfilter (that’s a whole other conversation!). However as the blog is aimed mostly at teachers and support staff I decided this wasn’t such a big issue. This is partly because we now have a computer in the staffroom that isn’t filtered so no blocked sites.
Anyway, when I checked my plan for this week I realised I am doing exactly what I’d intended. I am taking my first actions in my research, adding a blog to the Classroom Displays Group.

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