OMG it’s nearly Christmas!
OK, seriously, where is the time going? Is it disappearing into some greedy black hole somewhere?
Well, since my last posting I have mostly been doing Perception. I have been supporting academics with their various issues as they are preparing their end of term tests. An interesting problem cropped up during a law exam where the students were asked to type an essay type answer to a legal matter. The answer fields had no authoring functionality so several students bombed out of their tests due to pressing a keyboard command such as tab as they were trying to format their essay. This seems a bit lacking on the part of Questionmark so I have mailed them to see what they come up with. Other problems include the Perception server dying just before a large test commenced. the result of this was about 90 students couldn’t access their test which made for stressed students and a stressed academic. This has led me to think maybe I should add “Psychic ability” to my CPD as I never saw that one coming!!
Other work stuff has included some supporting documentation for our e-portfolio software, PebblePad, working on the online tutoring course and fighting with Xerte, so far it is refusing to bend to my will. I WILL win.
I am looking forward to a break over Christmas as I need some time off work in which I can concentrate on designing a workable quantum computer. I need to sort out a couple of small blips such as solving the problem of coherence. I may have to take a couple of days to brush up on entanglement theory and then I feel sure I will have it cracked! 
Yep, seriously, I think I need a holiday!!
Where did October go?
Well, here am I saying I would be good and post regularly and have seemed to have completely missed October! However, having said that I have been kept very busy with Perception, both training and providing support.
Things I have been doing since my last post:
I have been very excited about getting my hands on Moodle. I have been following the tutorials from Lynda.com and with Mark L’s help set up WAMP on my machine which has enabled me to run a mini-moodle server. I have been transferring information from the Sharepoint online tutoring site and at the same time experimenting with the different functionality.
I have also had a look at Xerte (re-usable learning object editor). I would like to be able to publish RLO’s created in Xerte into the online tutoring course. Hopefully will be able to update you on how I have been getting on in my next post.
Another thing which has made me think is how do you get people to engage with online activities in a blended learning course? This can often be a bit of a sticking point. Other than make participants do it by assigning a grade to their online input, does anyone out there have any other ideas which have worked for them??
: )