Yesterday was the first day of half term and I had decided to stay in and rest, so I ended up spending quite a few hours on the computer, mostly dealing with Ultraversity stuff. JellyOS is a terrible time waster, although it feels rewarding when you do manage some kind of communication after lots of repeated faffing about. I've built a page of links to links and links to current discussions which should help with slightly more direct access. The discussion which I created and linked to from the learning support page is starting to pick up, and I created a quality new piece of jellyART work.
That's all very well, but i can't afford to spend all my time messing about there when there is coursework to be done!
I've re-read the brief for activity one and realised that I have a problem finishing it off, since I'm required to interview a line manager and now it's half term I won't be able to do that for ages, if at all. So I came up with two other ways of researching the Coordinator Role. I posted a short question to the newsgroup uk.education.schools-it and within 20 minutes had a useful reply from an ICT Coordinator in a primary school. That may even break out into a more lengthy discussion, as can easily happen in an unregulated environment using simple and well established technology.
In addition, I was looking at fellow student Denise Binks website and realised that as a technician who takes a lot under her wing, she still works with a Coord, so I asked a question in Denise's guestbook and soon there was a new section in her activity one coursework about the two roles. This is useful to both of us.
I've now got rather a lot of gathered material for activity one, but that's OK because it is a substantial activity compared to some of the later ones. I looked at the work in progress 'simpletext' document I'd brought home on my pen drive and found it hard to work with in a Windows environment, and appleworks documents are unreadable so what format should I use to write up my coursework?
I had previously discounted the idea of presenting it as a website, for two reasons - it seems a bit OTT, takes a bit longer to load up a big package like dreamweaver than a text editor, and I don't feel I want to be writing for a world-wide audience "hullo this is me, here's my picture, here's my cat " sort of thing.
But when it comes down to it, HTML is the best tool I have for the job. It is afterall, a
(hypertext) Markup Language, which is quick and easy to create headings, subheadings, lists and bullet points. it's platform independent, universally deployed and I'll be able to incorporate multimedia elements later if I really have to. I don't have to put it online if I don't want to, I can transport it on my keyring pen drive, and email pages to my facilitator as attachments.
So that's the decision made, I've made a good start, and I'm happy that I know what I'm doing at last. Now I should be able to concentrate more on getting on with it, and finding it enjoyable. By the end of half term I'll be well up to date.
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