News & Views
Still around -- just! Reflections on my diploma work
By Terry Freedman
Thu, 7 Aug 2008, 11:41

At this time of year, my body, having spent decades (it feels like centuries sometimes!) being regulated by education timetables, tells me it's time to take a break.

Well, I haven't done so, as such, although I have been being kind to myself by not even attempting to update this website every day.

I regard this as a long-term investment (especially bearing in mind Keynes' dictum that in the long run we're all dead).

But I have not been idle. Apart from quite a bit of writing, I've been working for a Local Authority exploring resources that might be used for teaching the Diploma from the start of September. Here are my thoughts and findings so far.

Sometimes one can start too soon on this sort of quest. I have discovered that one or two of the websites I looked at a few months ago, at which time they were bare, have now started to become populated. I am pleased to say, however, that I ensured that my time was not completely wasted by the simple expedient of flagging the sites in my list for further investigation.

That's a trick I learnt from the way computers work. When you delete a file from your computer, it doesn't really get deleted. All that happens is that its name is removed from a sort of table of contents, and the space it occupies is flagged as being available for use by other files created in the future.
In a similar way, I decided to not delete websites and other resources I found wanting because (a) I wanted a record of what I'd looked at and (b) I wanted the option of being able to return to them at some future time.

Keeping a record is quite important. When the Diplomas were first announced, there were no resources developed specifically for them. There are precious few now, actually. However, if your job is to find resources, and you're not finding too many, you need to be able to show what you've been doing, in case someone asks. To be honest, this is largely academic in my case: my clients trust me. Nevertheless, you never know when a bean counter is going to come along and demand copious proof of what has been paid for. More importantly, it's a matter of professional pride for me to keep accurate records of how much time I spend on projects and how I spend it.

So what I did was simply make the font colour grey. The entry is there, but immediately recognisable as not useful at the moment.

One thing is not to second-guess what teachers want. There is no doubt that teachers will want to customise any resources created for the Diploma. By the same token, they will not object to customising resources that were not created for the Diploma. That does not mean that one might as well collate hundreds of websites regardless of quality, just that the ones that look like a near-enough fit will almost certainly be worth considering.

One last thing, which like most of the observations in this post are true in many circumstances, is that it is important to make notes. So, I have not simply created a list of websites, but a list of websites with descriptions of the type of content on them, which Diploma(s) they are most suitable for, and comments on the quality of the websites.

These mini-reviews (which are easy once you've been using Twitter or Blippr for a while) are extremely important. Not only do they save teachers time, but they serve as an aid-memoir to oneself.

I found with this project, as with all projects, that the artisan's approach is always best, even when -- no, especially when -- there is an absolute, and tight, deadline for its completion. The correct approach is to spend ages on preparation rather than dive straight into it. Not only does that ensure a better quality, it also saves time in the long run.

In my case, the preparation was setting up a spreadsheet to hold all the information. The investment in time has proven well-founded, because the versatility of spreadsheets is such that you can do lots of things with the data without having to enter anything twice. For example, if I need a PDF of some websites, I just have to use mail-merge to pull the data in from the spreadsheet.

In fact, although online utilities such as Google Docs are extremely good (I use them all the time), I do find that in some respects they are not as efficient as their offline cousins. For example, you can't run macros in a Google spreadsheet.

Anyway, that was just a quick update on what I've been up to and my reflections on the work I've been doing. I hope you have found it interesting, and if you have any observations on anything I've said here, I'd be interested to hear them.

© Terry Freedman Thu, 7 Aug 2008