Monday, January 10, 2011

Plans for 2011

Looking forward to another busy but interesting year after a couple of weeks of tramping and camping in the great NZ outdoors. On the research front, a major objective will be to ensure the Ako Aotearoa National project ‘perspectives of first year apprentices’ is completed. Also, will need to put time into organising myself to apply for funding for projects in 2012. Several ideas now starting to firm up and move into the proposal writing stage. These include an ‘interactive text book template’ for tablets and a bid for external funding to explore ‘authentic assessments’ which reflect the multiliteracies and multimodalities inherent in trades skills (or for that matter any other vocational learning).


On the teaching front, it will be good to work through a really ‘blended’ delivery option for one of my courses as there will be students enrolled from both CPIT (Christchurch) and NMIT (Nelson) on the same course. It will be good to be able to move back into ‘distance delivery’ mode as it presents on-going challenges to my teaching practice.

In the area of staff development, the Centre for Educational Development (CED) should be gaining traction across this year as our new manager settles in and the new programme development and review regime through NZQA beds down. I am looking forward to working with the CED team as roles become established and the centre gains credibility within the institution.

In addition, I have received an invitation from the Institute of Adult Learning in Singapore to do some work with them. Firstly through a feasibility study to be completed at the end of January. From the study, the contribution of the CPIT adult education team, the CED and Ako Aotearoa Academy may become more formalised into the future. I also hope to negotiate some shared projects on the research front, especially into the area of workplace learning and assessments. The work will be especially interesting for me as it means a return to the country of my childhood, where the contexts of education and training is different from what occurs in NZ.

I have put in abstracts to two conferences for this year but will not be committing to many more, probably just another one. Also have started on drafting several journal articles and it will be another learning experience to work at submitting and honing the articles for acceptance.

So another year of more learning and development as I settle into my various roles. Life is always interesting :)

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