Hard copy notes

Here is a picture from the A&P pavement art competition

HI Guys, I am very interested in what happens to our material once students finish their course, as a great accumulator of paper material I often think how I would cope with the information I needed being on-line for only a short period of time. I could be very unsustainable and print it out I guess, I encourage students to keep stuff as an e-book (if there is a term like that) for future reference. When I studied here in Veterinary nursing, a few years ago now, the notes were sent to us in huge folders and covered the whole course material, I remember thinking do I have to know all of this? I would read bits of the course material that wasn't even relevant to the unit I was studying at the time, and very often got side tracked into doing other stuff because I found something interesting; I was able to be very disciplined though and do what was needed but I can now imagine a student overwhelmed with the old hard copy material, reading irrelevant topics and struggling to get back on track. The idea that the information is now sent out in manageable chunks, in individual units with timeframes and guidance through wiki books, work plans and weekly study plans from the tutors seems much more manageable.



So I have completely changed my idea about the need for hard copy materials, when we changed over I first thought that we were short changing students who paid for a course and now had to pay to print out their own notes etc, but I now see that it isn't the notes that provide the driving force for the study, it is the interactions between people, students now access stuff any time of day or night, and at any place (with a wireless connection) and we can keep notes up to date at the touch of a button, it doesn’t get more flexible than that! But on the downside, I think when our students finish the course the shell is closed to them so they have no on-going reference material to support the lifelong learning idea whereas I still have my monster folders. I wonder if we should now be encouraging graduates to join other forums to remain current such as the Veterinary Nurses association and others like our OP facebook forums, if anybody has any suggestions feel free to let me know.

Careers Expo

Have been spending a few hours at the local careers expo, lots of parents and prospective students here. Took Bam with me ( a puppy we are looking after) and she really enjoyed it, lots of treats for both puppies and people. It was really good to talk to students and find out what motivates them to go into a chosen field of study, there is a wide range of people out there, it was obvious some just got dragged along by mum and dad, but others so enthusiastic it gives me hope.
I am going back again today and tomorrow, I really like this sort of stuff but will swap dogs today and take Finbar ('cos he's missing out on the treats).
Will hopefully get some pictures to make it more interesting for you. Great being able to just write my thoughts down without feeling stupid, the more I do it the less stupid I feel. Good for my morale.

The organisation and flexible learning

I see the organisation (in this case Otago Polytechnic) like the picture of this magnificent tree. The solid rock with it's intertwined tree roots is an analogy for the foundations that an institution can provide in order for the student to feel thay can lay roots, feel part of and use the rock to produce upright growth and ultimately flourish. In order to give the student the best chance at succeeding we can aim to be as flexible as possible in our interactions, this can mean time (out of hours for instance), location - do we always need to meet at the office or classroom, and content. The latter can be the most difficult for a lot of unit standards based vocational courses, like veterinary nursing, where stakeholders (agricultural industry for one) have a big say in what type of workforce they require, and we then tailor our courses to meet those needs. We do have some flexibility in the way we interpret the unit standards assessments but these must fall in line with industry not student.

I like the notion of treating our adult learners like adults, the use of lerning contracts to set out what we are going to study and when can be very useful, I have found that given the choice students will use their time wisely, and if they know exactly what is expected of them, they can negotiate and take ownership of the study.

There is some good information about using learning contracts at this website

https://www.msu.edu/user/coddejos/contract.htm

Happy learning!