foolfillment: the blog

In August I’ll be doing this teaching thing for real and I expect I’ll find it hard work, there’ll be ups and downs, and I expect I will need to talk about how I’m getting on just to help me through it.

Ordinarily the two people I fall back onto for support most are my girlfriend and my mum, next August though things are going to be different - my girlfriend graduates from vet school this summer and the chances of us ending up working in the same place in August are minimal so she’s going off to do something very exciting instead by volunteering to work as a vet in the Cook Islands for two months from mid-August. I’m very jealous.

She hit a small stumbling block when she found out she’d be the only vet there at the time so asked my mum (a recently retired vet) if she fancied an adventure…

The upshot of all that is that next August when I’m starting my probationary year two of my main people to fall back onto might be larking about on a paradise-like island on the other side of the world!

That’s probably where blogging will come in as a big help. There’s an interesting discussion going on over on Don’s Learning Log about the benefits of blogging and people’s resistance to it, the idea that it is a vanity thing.
The main reason I blog is I find it helps to write what I’m thinking and feeling, putting things into written words give me the opportunity to clarify my own ideas. It then has the added bonuses of people chipping in their comments too and helps me shape my ideas further, and giving the chance to read about what other people are thinking through their blogs, in general blogging just helps me make sense of things. So I don’t do it to make me look good, I blog it because I think it helps me do whatever I’m doing better.

[tags]blogging, teaching, probationary year, cook islands, vet[/tags]

“Few are moved by the pot of gold at the end of the impossible rainbow; few, likewise, by the easy capture of the paltry.”
Biggs, J. B. AND Moore, P., 1993. The Process of Learning Sydney: Prentice Hall

Motivation is proving to be an important part of my research in my final year project. What is it that makes people want to learn? The combination of the chance of success and the perceived value of what can be learned, suggested Biggs.

[tags]teaching, motivation, quote, biggs[/tags]

After a very quiet Christmas season in terms of blogging things are slowly starting up again at uni, today we had an optional session on using Camtasia but the term doesn’t really get started until Monday. It’s looking like it’ll be a pretty busy term though with a few assignments due very soon and a few more scattered over the rest of the time until Easter and all the while there’s the final year project to deal with. It’s probably a good thing though to have something to distract me from the fact that come mid-May I will no longer be a student with the opportunity to do pretty much whatever I fancy.

[tags] Camtasia, uni[/tags]