October : 2008 : E1n1verse

For the first time in years, I’m taking a postgraduate course myself: H812: Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice, which I’m doing both for personal development and to provide theoretical groundwork in educational pedagogy for my Ph.D. work in educational technology.

A recent activity asked us to reflect on influences on our teaching practices, considering: practices arising from personal experiences as a student; practices from our departments; and practices we can attribute to other sources. In addition, we were asked to consider aspects of our workplace that favoured or hindered good practice. I starting making notes on the 14th of October. I did not post them to my group because I felt this was a really important activity. If you don’t know where you’ve come from, it can be difficult to move ahead in a purposeful fashion. I wanted this activity to serve as a good baseline, so I invested a substantial amount of effort into thinking about it and writing it up in a coherent, cohesive fashion.

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“Something has changed within me
Something is not the same
I’m through with playing by the rules<br /
Of someone else's game
Too late for second-guessing
Too late to go back to sleep
It’s time to trust my instincts
Close my eyes and leap.”

Lyrics from Defying Gravity, out of the musical Wicked.
Lyrics and music by Stephen Schwartz

Sometimes you have to be smart enough to realize that the battle you’re fighting isn’t one you are going to win or even sometimes one you want to win. I walked into my supervisor’s office in September and told him I was throwing away all my document similarity and agents work from the last twelve years.

I took the leap.

I landed in a new Ph.D. project in the same research group at the University of Sussex but in a completely different area. Good bye, information retrieval. Hello, educational technology.

Not only do you have to be smart enough to realize you can’t win at some things, you have to be smart enough to realize that you should be doing what you’re already good at and have been doing. My seemingly impetuous decision is not as foolish as it might sound. I have been working in online distance education using educational technology at the Open University since 2000. I am based in a group at the University of Sussex studying how technology can be used to scaffold learning. I am in daily contact with other educational technologists, practitioners and researchers, via Twitter and other social networks on a daily basis. I belong to that community. It’s time to trust my instincts and do what I am.

Welcome to Michelle 2.0.

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