Out of the Swamp

Well the day of reckoning is almost upon me. On Friday I will be doing my presentation and I am excited about that. There have been a couple of late questionnaires handed in so will have to add the comments to my analysis. The comments so far have mostly been pretty positive. Those who have contributed to the wiki or blog have been the most prolific in their praise (which is not surprising). I am pretty happy with the response to the questionnaire so far. I think I am now up to 8 or 9 replies out of 11 so that is a pretty good response and gives me enough to work on.

Probably, if I had had another meeting and a discussion about the merits or otherwise of the wiki and blog, I may have elicited some richer deeper reflection, however, any more than 2 meetings is probably too much for tutors to attend due to their busy schedules. It was hard enough to find time with the two that I had for everyone to be able to attend. I am really happy that a couple of tutors took me up on my invitiation to give 1:1 tuition. This worked very well in the 3 cases (or six if you count one who had 3 private sessions).
The thought that strikes me most from the questionnaires is the comment that our client base of students is mostly resistant to or technology-poor, meaning they do not have access to technology at home. (Not quite true as most of the students in my classes at least have access to technology at home) However, this is a good question for us to chew on as there has to be a way that technology can be made available to students. Already they have access to support on Friday afternoons with a tutor as well as access to the computers. There is also access on a Wednesday at Kallista Community House and there is always the library. Making the learning of technology a core subject of the training Packages may be a way of doing it but there is no way it can be made compulsory I don’t think.

Perhaps we could start a bank of secondhand computers – perhaps a Work for the Dole project where they recondition old computers people hand in. I know that any computer I finish with is still OK to use so why wouldn’t other peoples’ computers be likewise. It is just a matter of advertising what we are doing. Of course storage of these computers is another question altogether! That suddenly makes the whole project look a bit sick! Anyway – worth a bit of discussion with L. Still does not address the question of fast internet access though.