Focus found, lost and found again!

A week is a long time in politics and a day is a long time in Applied Practice in Blended and Online Teaching. Having had a set-back with my original focus idea this week, I was pleased to decide on a mobile learning expert session and podcasting as the focus for this module. I had already ordered two books of podcasting from Amazon and then in the virtual office hours that same day my discussion with Keith took a different turn and we decided that I should take mentoring as my second focus rather than podcasting. The logic behind this was to keep everything focussing around one area. At first glance mentoring may not seem to have anything in particular to do with mobile learning but in this case I will be mentoring fellow-student Nicky who is currently working through the Customised Study module with her focus on, guess what... mobile learning! My focus for this module is now therefore presenting an expert session on mobile learning whilst simultaneously mentoring a student investigating the same area. It seems like a great opportunity to kill two birds with one stone and refresh and deepen my knowledge of mentoring.

In a previous job I did a training course on coaching which I thought might be similar to mentoring. In actual fact a quick search of the internet tells me that experts consider coaching and mentoring to be two different things so before I go any further I think a definition is in order. Becky Wai-Packard of Mount Holyoak College shares a definition of mentoring as:

"a relationship between a less experienced individual, called a mentee or protégé, and a more experienced individual known as a mentor... that fosters the mentee’s professional, academic, or personal development (Donaldson, Ensher, & Grant-Vallone, 2000)"

In order to perform successful mentoring some structure is required. Nicky and I have had a first meeting in which we discussed this structure and agreed that we would write a mentoring contract in which both of us clearly state what we expect from the mentoring relationship and what we commit ourselves to contribute. Our first commitment is an agreement to meet online at least once a week with meetings taking place every Friday. Our first meeting this week used Skype but in future we want to use google hangouts which offers the ability to share documents and desktops which might make the mentoring process even more rewarding. As a theoretical basis for the mentoring Keith suggested the GROW model which I am now going to use. GROW is an acronym for Goal - Current Reality - Options - Will (MindTools, undated) which describes the four main steps the mentoring process should go through. As I continue my research and active mentoring it may be that other tools also become relevant and I will explore as many of them as time allows.

For the moment I now need to get my Learning Agreement submitted, work on the mentoring agreement for Nicky and start working on my expert session. I can already tell that the next few weeks are going to be busy but also very interesting.

http://ehrweb.aaas.org/sciMentoring/Mentor_Definitions_Packard.pdf [accessed 18.2.2012]

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_89.htm [accessed 18.2.2012]

Finding a focus

Today is the submission day for our APBOT learning agreements and unfortunately I have had a small problem finding a focus. I read recently that online moderators were needed for the annual conference of IATEFL (the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language) so sent an email to the organizers offering my services. The role involved moderating discussions and presentations and generally keeping people not physically at the conference involved and up-to-date. Sadly my initial email application must have got lost because I got no reply. I sent a second mail only to be informed that they now had enough people but that I was first reserve. This message came through just a couple of days ago so it has not given me much time to think of an alternative. Waiting to see if I do actually get called up at the last minute is not really compatible with using this experience for my module.

There may however now be a light at the end of the tunnel. As luck would have it my classmate Nicky from the University of Westminster is involved in a new JISC project on m-learning which I may be able to make a contribution to as a guest speaker. M-learning was the subject of my previous project in the module Customised Study for Blended and Online Education so I have some ideas about what is going on in that area as well as data about my own students' attitudes and opinions on m-learning. This all still has to be claried with both Westminster and my tutor at Napier but if it all works out I will be using that as the "Practical Student Support Activity" part of my project. Supporting my own students is not really possible at the moment because they now have their semester break and won't be back until the beginning of April.

The other part of this module is an optional "Developmental Element". As I am always very keen to play around with new software this could be a good chance to play around with some programs I have recently found; Snap!, Snap! Empower and GLOmaker2. I might even produce a series of podcasts for my main course next semester, Professional English: Engineering. Luckily my tutor is aware of the above problems but it would still be nice to submit a rough outline today to at least have something to discuss.

Let's wait and see how the rest of the day goes and whether I am actually able to find a focus.

Neil