Out to dinner

The activity that generated my ‘bucket list‘ was driven by Majella, perhaps with some assistance from the other wives, so it was no real surprise that one of the items was ‘take your beautiful wife out to dinner’. That seemed like an easy inclusion for me, especially since we were planning to travel for 3 months and would need to...

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Visit a waterfall

Another of the items on my ‘bucket list‘ was to ‘visit a waterfall’. I didn’t expect that to be a major challenge because we have always enjoyed short walks in the forest to visit waterfalls. At the same time we were going to be away for 12 weeks and had no specific plans for waterfall visits in that time unlike...

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Read a novel

Reading a novel was one of the 10 items on my ‘bucket list’ that I expected should not be challenging in retirement. Thus it was one that I decided to tackle early. The lucky break I had with Emily’s quinoa cake took care of trying a new food so I had already ticked off the first item on my list....

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Retired

As of Monday, 1 January, I am officially retired. My retirement arrangement with USQ specified 31 December, 2017, as my retirement date with all leave to be taken prior to that date. It is 6 months since I did my last day of work at USQ and went on extended leave from 4 July.

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My bucket list

A few weekends ago we had a group of friends over for a shared lunch. Majella’s pretext was that somebody else had been going to host it but they were unavailable. Lunch was fine – food, wine and fun company – but the real reason was eventually revealed as a celebration of impending retirement for me and two of our...

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Time for a change

For the past several years this blog has been mostly postings of links to items I’ve bookmarked using Diigo generated automatically each day from Diigo. Those links have been mostly associated with resources I’ve bookmarked for classes that I’ve been teaching. There have been occasional other posts related to conference attendance or some thinking about courses I’ve been teaching. Now...

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SITE 2017 – Austin, Texas, 5–9 March

Last week I attended the 2017 international conference of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE) with support from the USQ Faculty of Business, Education, Law and Arts where I work in the School of Teacher Education and Early Childhood. I’m thankful for that support and for the patience of students in my classes who may have experienced...

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Muddling in Moodle

Those of us involved with developing and teaching courses hear a lot about the desirability of consistency which sometimes seems to be interpreted as just short of uniformity. Historically that is based on student responses to a survey conducted a few years ago which was interpreted as students wanting to see the same features in the same locations in different courses....

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Creating digital solutions in EDP4130

It’s late January. I started writing this earlier in the month, soon after I was back in my office and thinking about first semester courses. After a couple of years working with the most recent iteration of assessment in EDP4130, a project-based design challenge, it was time to consider a change. In 2015 and 2016 students created teaching resources for the two...

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Muddling through Moodle books

I want to be a good corporate citizen but that can be difficult when the tools (like a web server) that enable you to do your job are withdrawn. Still that impulse got me thinking about using Moodle books to present study material. If that could be made to work, without subverting the quality of presentation of materials, it would get material in-house and offer advantages of being easily printed or downloaded as eBooks for use on computer, tablet or smartphone.

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