12 mongrels wanted: small group for those of no particular pedigree

Is there room for another mutt of indeterminate pedigree in this group? This one sounds like my kind of people.

I have come late to the party because I’ve been on hols the past week (Scottish Borders – good walking country if only it wasn’t so bloomin’ cold! So much for this ‘Siberian spring’ we are having 🙁

So, about me… I’m a lecturer in Tourism and Airline Management at Edinburgh Napier.  After working out in the ‘real world’ (haha! ;P) for many years, earning my daily crust in a variety of sectors, I then worked in FE for several years, before taking the plunge and doing my PhD at Stirling, which I completed 5 years ago. That was my ticket into HE and I’ve been there 5 years now. I have a PG Diploma teaching qualification and I’m going to be starting my BOE (Blended and Online Education) PG Cert this Autumn. I thought this course would be a good way to break myself into it (‘it’ being TEL-related things).

I’ve taught on online courses when I was at Stirling and we are big users of Moodle (and WebCT before it) at Napier, so I’m not scared of technology but I do admit to not having enough time to keep abreast of everything that’s possible.

Don’t know if these credentials get me into this group?

Shuna

yip yap, can i still join in the small group for mongrels?

PS hi SolentRoger!

Thanks! Looks like we just need one more to be  a pack 🙂 what will we discuss first? 🙂

Must admit I was shocked by all of the “please take me off, I don’t want this” activity. Given that mailing lists have existed for over 20 years, my (it seems naive) assumption was that people knew all about them and how they worked by now. Perhaps my judgement was clouded by years of experience looking after a lists server with ~6,000 mailing lists on it.

However, people genuinely seem not to know how they work. Perhaps because it is a dying art with people tweeting instead? Or following RSS feeds. Or something else. But the fact that lots of people operated under the “a human reads all of these messages therefore I’ll ask them to take me off” principle (whilst replying to messages that contained instructions on how to carry out that task they wanted someone else to do just goes to show that assumptions are dangerous!

And every e-mail account that I’ve ever used has had some form of filtering on it (from hand coding my own .forward files back in the early days, to Exchange and GMail filters nowadays). So again, a lack of knowledge about these functions was surprising.

Perhaps the only non-surprise was that people had ticked a box on a sign up form without fully comprehending what that meant. Have you read all of the iTunes terms and conditions that you’ve clicked to say you have? Like the bit that says you can’t use it to make “nuclear missiles, chemical or biological weapons”? Of course you haven’t…