Drawing to a close...

Fortunately for me I am not a 'true' obsessive compulsive; therefore I can leave my final draft alone... as the final draft even... instead of the semi final draft...

Perhaps the fact that I have to dye my hair, handwater the garden, pack my bag, go to the doctor etc before I get on that plane tomorrow morning may have a leeeetle bit to do with this newfound strength of character.

Free At Last ... Free At Last... Almost...

Okay so it hasn't been 28 years since I began this project but if a 'thousand years is but a day unto the Lord'... reverse that and you get my drift!

I am excrutiatingly happy to say that I have finally finished my first draft of the Rationale!

As prescribed by all writing gurus, I shall now leave it for a full 24 hours before reading it again!

Now to more serious matters...

I'm sick of reading!!! I've consumed the entire of Egbert, Hanson-Smith's "CALL Environments" +++ reams of downloads from the CLN618 site and don't feel any closer to putting my 'Rationale' together for the final assignment. Well that's not quite true.

I'm okay with most of it... It's the 'reference to literature that's bogging me down. I know why I do what I do. I know why it works in my classes. It's finding the recognised experts to quote that I find a tad wearying. Oops I think I just joined Ruthie again... Triple that Tad, add expletive pain in the wherever, plus multiple yawns and why not throw in those steak knives while you're at it.



On the flip side... there is so much more I want to do with the second assignment... but time doesn't permit, so it will have to wait until after this unit is over. As I fully intend to use this Health and Nutrition online work in the teaching module I'm putting together, I know that what is assessed will not actually be the final product that my students will be using... That's why I intend to keep this blog going long after this unit is over... as a true reflection on the final product.

Yet another week has flown by...

... and what a week it's been. Four full days teaching, a student birthday celebration followed smartly by my grandson's 4th birthday celebration. I can't believe it took me nearly two hours to buy his birthday gifts; which ended up being 3 boxes of leggo - which he loved,
a Times table book with a singalong CD - which my daughter thought was highly inappropro - hmmm
and Thomas the Tank Engine sliding number cards - another gift which underwhelmed my daughter... hmmm

Actually Conor (Mr now 4) is very interested in his numbers, always wanting to join in when his big sister is doing her homework... this will,hopefully, rearrange the power ratio as the Times Table book and the Thomas the Tank Engine number cards are HIS!

You know you're a Cyborg when...

... your computer doesn't boot up and you feel you've lost a vital organ!

Which is just what happened yesterday... My very young... only 14 months since it was built... computer turned into a tin box yesterday when upon poking and prodding at the start AND reboot buttons no blue or red lights came on! What fun... finding a computer mechanic on a Saturday who would even look at it! Fortunately for me an old friend of a friend said... "Bring it over and I'll take a look at it." The fact that I live miles from anywhere gives "bring it over" a whole new look and feel! However, one frantic car ride later I was a much happier cy - bee...

Double fortunately he had a spare power box lying around his workshop that actually worked... (They usually have all these discarded bits from old computers that should have been thrown out years ago.) Triple fortunately it fitted my computer and in two shakes of a mini screwdriver the lights came back on in my not so little 'black box' (I knew it was ominous that my new computer's shell was black - just asking for a major crash for sure!)

Being of a curious bent my computer saviour and I pulled the old power box apart and sure enough it had blown a capacitor! So here's hoping the new one can take the workload I impose upon it.

The sad news is I lost a vital day so my schedule is

Can't Believe It's Friday AGAIN!!!

The past week has whizzed by. I've been adding, editing and fiddling with my second assignment before and after work... This morning I spent 3 hours trying to work out why the pop up feedback messages on one of my quizzes remained transparent. Finally fixed it but still don't understand why it happened in the first place which is very annoying. Also, everytime I adjusted the wretched thing it erased any changes I made in Dreamweaver... it's the HotPotatoes software... Imagine the joy of continually adding 'Flash Buttons' - uploading them and then doing it again... Okay so some days I am very slow on the uptake.

That said, I still think it was worth it because I also sorted out the problem with the images not showing once I had transferred the file... I do hope my students appreciate all these little nuances when they are doing the exercises... :(

Sorry no piccies today... maybe next time.

Zee good news is...

That I have uploaded my entire website onto the QUT H Drive... though it's still a work in progress. Being such a huge file it took 50 minutes to load... but there it is and I am sooooooooooooooooooooo relieved.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaagh

Just tore my finger nail whilst trying to put the magnetic insert into my woollen underblanket. It's really been that kind of a day...

An Expensive Lesson

It turns out that not only did the dreaded zipfile not go anywhere... it kept trying to upload all night. It would get half way and then crash... then automatically try again... Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh! When I got up the next morning I found it still trying to load... when I got to work I got 3 emails from Telstra telling me that I was progressively eating up all my allotted usage for the month... by email three I had gone 136megabytes over... and this only the first week of the current month. Never again will I try to send such a huge file and especially never through Outlook!

They are ONLY a bunch of machines connected by wires and optic fibre cables after all...

Well after working most of the weekend on adjusting my Quest as well as working on assignment 2 and then getting home from a full day's teaching last night to spend another 3 hours at it... plus rising before the Kookaburras this morning... zipping my file and emailing my lecturer with my new you beaut updated version of the WebQuest before heading off to another full days teaching - I get home to find that the email hasn't gone and in fact is still trying to go this minute as I type... errr the file, though zipped, is huge... because the WebQuest is now attached to the new website I'm building and all the other things I'm putting together for the second assignment. No wonder Debra didn't answer my email... she hasn't got it yet... Oh well they are only machines after all ... connected by a tissue of optic fibres... what do we expect?

Zorba Lives

As does his dilemma. Experimenting is time consuming ...

and then... if you don't experiment how will you learn new things... and then if you do experiment how then will you get everything done... but then if you don't you may end up with something very ordinary...

What the hey ... Let's dance...

Dizzy but Delighted

I really can't believe how long I spent at the computer yesterday. At 8:45pm I decided to close it all down. It's the size of the task I have set myself that is the problem. But I really can't downsize now as it would defeat the initial purpose.

However having spent a mere 5 hours tidying up a friend's Quest I realize just how complicated mine is. I really won't know how effective it is until I trial it in the classroom and I don't want to pre-empt that just to fit into the time frame of this subject. I have planned that the WebQuest will be the major task in my Health and Nutrition module that I am currently writing to use at UIL. I don't want to spoil my current students' learning outcomes just to appease other goals.

Well needs must away as I have a full days work to do on my own assignment and it is now after 10am.

The Pilgrim Progresses

A little progress in Dreamweaver... hence the size of the type... Embarrassing as it is to admit - I didn't know how to load a Word file into Dreamweaver. After battling with the Dreamweaver Help menus off an on for the past hour I decided to simply save the Word document as a Web Page into the relevant Dreamweaver folder and make a link...


Well must get back to it... a woman's etc ....

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaggghhhhhh

I'd like to say that after that display of frustration I felt better but it's just not that simple. Have been up since dawn trying to sort out my Hot Potatoes exercises to put into my new module.

After spending hours last weekend creating a couple of half way decent and also pedagogically reasonable exercises in the Old Hot Potatoes program because the New one doesn't work well unless you have the latest in Java... and not everyone will right? That was another couple of hours wasted but we won't go there right now... BACK to the grumble at hand... I put in these lovely little images that I had painstakingly doctored in Photoshop so that they would load quickly and they wont show once I drop the file into Dreamweaver and load it with the rest of my files.

I even went into the html codes and rejigged them... still no go. So I thought I'll just delete and reload the images from the folder I have for the entire site... and still no go. The URLs work but not my little piccies... I am miffed I can tell you as I hate anything to beat me. But I really have to stop wasting time on this or I will never get it all done. I shall just have to come back to it another time and fly without pictures for now. It's not as if they are essential after all. It's only for us visual learners who just LOVE pictures in everything. We'll just have to be satisfied with all the nice piccies on the websites we click to from my Quizzes.

Leaving Now...

Into The Valley

Today is our last Workshop. I hope I can absorb all the necessary data to come away from this suitably enlightened and prepared for the final assignment.


There is so much scope in this unit that one often feels like a child on Christmas morning wondering which present to open first... or worse a child in a lolly shop with limited funds.

There is simply not enough time to do this subject justice. My concern is that when the time frame is lifted so will the urgency of accumulating new knowledge. I guess that's why we do formalised study rather than plodding on in splendid isolation.


Must away and get ready for the battle...

Looks Like I'll Have to Practice On Myself

Oh Dear... I think that First Aid course has hoo dooed me. I am so ill... migraine nausea the works!
Alas today is my study day and I can no longer sit at the computer to read. I have an all day workshop tomorrow and having missed the last one must go to this one dead or alive. I would have preferred to have gone all read up and ready to go.

However, I think I had better just rest in a dark room so that I can go at all! What a pill. I am truly sick of being sick this year... enough grumbling ... am off to try and get rid of this headache.

It's Okay To Pass Out Near Me Now .... Maybe

Well let's say it's a lot safer than it was before. This week 8 of our staff did a First Aid Cert course. For some it was a mere refresher. For others like myself who have not done anything even similar for over 20 years one could hardly call if a refresher; more like a resuscitation.



Amazingly I blitzed the final test... hmmm maybe that says more about the test level rather than my first aid knowledge. I really think multiple choice questions are not an accurate assessment of your knowledge but they are an easy out for those who must mark them. I took the opportunity of passing this observation on in the "Do you have any comments?" section.


Anyway, the good news is that I am up to date on CPR. They've changed it! It's now 30 firm presses to the chest and 2 breaths which you have to do 5 times in 2 minutes. Boy aren't you glad they made it more simple?

However did they save anyone before!?!