Teraknor

There is a perpetual myth that makes academics from our module team sad. Not the one about Unicorns running the Internet - instead it is the insistence of some students that it is okay to break the rubric on the examination - as it is an excellent spread betting technique to guarantee good results. Please - STOP IT!!! Tantrum over and here is the informed explanation - firstly if you do not know what a rubric is, it is the rule/guide of the examination paper. We have two sections, Part A, you have to answer all questions. Part B, answer two from the three questions. So Part A, is straight forward - Part B, you MUST do as asked. Part B, is worth 40 marks (40%), each question is worth 20 marks. We estimate that you have 35 minutes per question. If you answer all three, you now drop that to 23 minutes. Worse is that often students who answer all three invariable get worse marks per question. Part of the myth declares that our examinations office will pick out the best two of three - in f...

Had a great conversation with a good friend last night who has recently started working for their local authority. After some typical banter - they marvelled at the nuanced corporate speak of their new environ. Large corporate environments encourage this - a lingua franca of their own making. I find that on occasion I use OU'isms and education'isms along with tech talk. Checking myself and reverting to plain English (at least I try). The conversation moved to common corporate terms (better known as bullshit) and how two different organisations have so much in common. With this in mind, our twisted minds moved rapidly to a Venn diagram of corporate bulls**t. What terms do you see in your organisation - what common terms do you use that coincides. Maybe its time we started collating these terms?

Memories - source Wikipedia I make no secret of entering this profession through the indelicate route of spending anti-social hours on a ZX81 then Spectrum. The image to the right sums up my experiences and the quality technical environment afforded to many in the early 1980's. Running my own sweaty little piracy ring - we lacked high tech dubbing equipment. Armed with cheap C90 cassettes - we would find ways of copying each others games using "The Key" . Using one cassette player, each block of the came would be loaded into memory before being dumped verbatim onto another cassette. It was possible for one single copy to take anything up to 30 minutes to complete. This was for anything up to 32K (yes kilobytes) of machine code. Nowadays, I can transfer a gigabyte of data into cloud storage to be replicated across multiple devices in minutes. Stream multi-megabyte videos while downloading a variety of other data formats. We have kind of forgotten the pace and sp...

Rather than blow my trumpet it is nice to let others make noise on my behalf. Yesterday (the 5th of October 2015), news was released that I am considered to be one of the 50 UK Higher Education influencers - around my work with teaching by twitter  Personally and professionally I am somewhat surprised that the many social media enthusiasts within higher education or education in general has not (as yet) seen this as a route to enhance their teaching and reach. So .... in a bloggers offer - I would love to work with others and help/support/advise/guide any ideas on using social media for teaching.

For regular readers of my blog, I am sure that you are used to my unusual utterances. Occasionally I follow the musings of Prof Steve Wheeler, who does a great job of lateral thinking. His latest post , explores the idea of how two entirely unrelated and potentially unusual souls could be connected (no matter how tenuously) into a topic covering something clever and critical relating to one's own professional practice. Being a child of the late 60's Monty Python was already the stuff of legends by the time I was old enough to comprehend their delicious humour. Apart from an off beat uncle who enjoyed singing the Spam song and hearing it on radio once or twice - I finally began to understand the wit of the Monty Python team during my teenage years. My take on Monty Python is that they are all about lateral thinking - taking the sideways view of an idea. Smacking it with wet fish, singing a daft song then turning it into something worthwhile. Source: Wikimedia Commons ...

Do you remember November 2005 - a different era and much has happened since. That year and the particular month in question heralded the entry of the Open University onto the Cisco Networking Academy scene. With a modest pilot of 273 students - the first presentation of T228 was a memorable experience for all the right reasons. Using version 3.1 of the CCNA - combined with Netlab and Day Schools - the two years of preparation slotted into place. Having lost count somewhere around the 6000th student mark - we now offer CCNAv5, CCNPv7 and CCNA-Security-v2. Many have gone on and acquired Cisco certifications and/or their degree of choice. In this time, the Open University has become a strategic member of the UK ASC (academy support centre) community - having the privilege of supporting other interesting and diverse Cisco Academies. Today a new group of students start - same hopes, desires, dreams and opportunities. Each a part of our journey.

First lets commence with a pithy (mis)quotation: Do not limit children to your learning, for they are born in a different time ... Chinese origin  Had a great conversation with a colleague ... we were almost unanimous in our view regarding written examinations. The dated nature of this anachronistic assessment is creating an additional cognitive challenge for students. We sit them in a hall - armed only with pen, paper, lucky soft toy and maybe bottled water. Then we ask them to recall volumes of information and write copious verbiage. When it comes to examinations, knowledge recall is one challenge - we all suffer from this to some extent. But dear reader of all ages, please tell me when you last had to write considerable amounts of information in reasonable prose using a scribbling implement. You may wish to try this out - but writing out this blog article onto a sheet of A4 paper using your favourite scribbling stick. Pauses as I assume you are trying this. When did ...