Things have been busy at work recently, so I haven't been able to get many of the projects I am working on moving. Last Wednesday we did a big event around Digital Fluency, one of the big university goals around preparing staff and students to live and work in today's digital world. It covers four main areas: IT skills, information literacy, critical thinking, and online interactions. I'm one of the main people for the online interactions side of things, so I helped create two of the stands for the event. We ran the event in the student union in the morning, with a repeat in the afternoon. It lasted almost 3 hours each time.

Then on Friday I helped out at with an LTA (learning, teaching and assessment) induction planning day, which was at Westin Park Museum. We are hoping to formalize induction around LTA so that everyone can take advantage of it when they join the university.

Yesterday I spent almost all day helping induct two new e-learning student assistants. One of them won't work for me, but will be working with the Blackboard system administrator. However, she is on vacation for the next three weeks (in Canada) so I am doing a lot of their induction in her place. It's good having new employees as we have a lot of work to do over the summer. The bad part is it will take a fair amount of my time to get them up to speed. They aren't coming in again until next week though so I have some more time to be prepared.

Next Monday is a national holiday and we get the Tuesday off as well, so it will be nice to have a long weekend. It coincides with Victoria's half-term school break, which is a week long. So we should have a nice time this weekend, though she has been given some end of year tests to mark (boo!). The standardized tests in England are all non-multiple choice, so they must be hand marked by all of the teachers. Central exam authorities sample work for consistency between teachers and uphold standards. It seems very robust, but also a lot of work. Imagine if the SAT was all hand-marked and free response like the writing section and you can start to see the scale of what they have to do (plus imagine doing that for about five different times during your school career). It doesn't help that the government has been introducing more and more tests for students, including some of the younger students. Recent news reports have been talking about students being over-tested without many benefits really being achieved.