Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

Having had only the very briefest opportunity to speak to you about what I am trying to achieve with this trial, I thought that I had better blog myself in order to more clearly explain how I think that this will be a much better medium for recording your experiences than the old system of keeping a diary.  When I first started looking into the alternatives to the diary, a number of internet based alternatives were immediately obvious as potential alternatives.  These were blogs, forums, wikis and Facebook.  After discussions with IT (mainly centred around maintaining your personal security whilst on attachment and being able to post data that the USACE might consider to be sensitive), we came to the conclusions that blogging was most likely to be the way ahead.  However, because this is still essentially an experiment, this is still not entirely a given; for those of you made nervous by this comment, there are a number of academic papers that were used to arrive at this conclusion.  For those that would like to re-assure themselves, two of these papers can be found at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/organisations/netlc/past/nlc2010/abstracts/PDFs/Mak.pdf and http://eprints.qut.edu.au/13066/1/13066.pdf.

But I guess the $64,000 question is, how did we get to the point that we concluded the diaries were no longer providing good return for the time taken to produce them in the first place?  The chief reasons are that:

• Keeping a diary is quite a stiff discipline with the pressure of work on site and it is not a practice that is widely observed any more, largely because people have moved on to things like blogs and Facebook (other interactive media are available).
• One of the most challenging things about being on attachment is the seperation from the School and other support networks that can help to make sense of experiences and help out if the water level is approaching the bottom of your nostrils.  Diaries do not help with this, blogging can.
• The diaries and associated AER are only read every 2 months or so by your mentors and the other lecturers and as a result, if there is a problem, the time for intervention has often long passed.
• The AER were just becoming padded out versions of the diaries, with little or no reflective practice and therefore, of little benefit in helping students to understand how they are progressing towards becoming a chartered engineer.

So how are we going to use this blog?  Well I guess that the first thing that I need you to understand is that this is actually a collection of blogs; what we are creating is a network of linked blogs not a forum.  When you post I would like you to categorise your posts under your own name.  This is because I want you to think of these categories as the space for your own blog and because there are certain restrictions that exist within the structure of the site that this will help us to get around, but more of that in a minute.  Forums on the other hand tend to be discussions about specific topics of interest, which is of course useful, but doesn’t replicate the old function of the diary. That is not to say that discussions on topics are discouraged, they will hopefully emerge.  It is just important to remember what the primary objective is for your blog i.e. a record of your personal experiences and your reflections upon them.

Jeremy Williams has this to say about blogs:  “informal systems such as blogs provide an opportunity to capture knowledge where it is created in an organisation, sharing that knowledge throughout the organisation.  Furthermore, the nature of blogging engines allows for the creation of a legitimate warehousing of captured knowledge and archiving for later retrieval”.  They are in effect reflective journals which makes them tremendously powerful learning tools, the real beauty of which is that most of the learning sneeks up on you through your own endevours, rather than being crammed down your throat by a teacher.

So what the heck does that really mean?  Well basically it means that rather than just using the blog to record things like “went to site meeting, no chocolate Hobnobs, Ernie (in charge of brew fund), not present either”.  The events form the basis of the journal entry, but the real value is gained from floating ideas about these events, or asking questions that you need help answering in connection with them.  The idea to be floated in this case could be: I reckon that he has done a runner with the tea kitty.  The question that could be asked is: does any one know where the thieving git has gone to?  Clearly this is a rather trivial example, but I hope it helps to illustrate at a very basic level the sort of reflective processes that need to be contained within a blog in order for it to be of most value.

At the level more appropriate to that you will be operating at on site, this post is floating ideas I have about the use of this blogging network.  I am reflecting on what I have learnt to date and I am now throwing it out there for your comments (note that no formal invitation is necessary, receiving comments is an integral part of blogging).  The comments that I receive will definately be considered and may well influence the manner in which this experiment progresses.  When you are recording your site experiences, therefore, you need to be blogging in a manner analogous to how I am writing at the moment.

So why create categories using your names?  This is because the structure of this site is based around one person setting up a blog, writing posts and then encouraging people to admire / comment on their work.  The role of the blogger has been taken by Holdfast IT, who have then invited you to be participants in their blog.  This is mainly for security reasons, but also to ensure that everyone with an interest in the discussions and posts that this site will contain, can actually see them.  We therefore, needed to create a space that you can think of as your own within the parent blog, hence the categories.  It was also apparent that in responding to a post, you may wish to include things like photos and other media;  this site will not allow you to do this via comments.  If, however, you post under the same category in response to another post i.e. the name of the original author, you are able to upload media whilst still directly linking your post to the one of interest.  There may well be other ways of achieving this outcome and as the year progresses and we get more familiar with the site, we should be able to share this and other learning with one another.

I will draw this post to a close now with one final point, as I can sense that you are probably getting twitchy about the length of my waffling.  This is to explain the connection between your blog and the AER.  One question that I would be asking if I were you is, if we are reflecting within the blog, what purpose does the AER serve?  The answer to that is that the AER is designed to make you think about how the experience you are gaining on site is contributing towards you achieving the DO / Competences required to become chartered.  The frame of reference for writing the AER is, therefore, the interpretation of the UKSPEC as published by your institution of choice  and the five examples of site experience contained within the AER, must be written as reflective studies that analyse your progress towards achieving these published outcomes.  Where insufficient progress is being made, recommendations for corrective action are expected within the report.  The blog on the other hand is just about trying to make sense out of the engineering and contracting that you are involved with.

Well the word count says 1377 and it has taken me about an hour and a half to write this.  That is about twice the length and half the time that it used to take me to try and retrospectively catch up with my diary at the end of every other month when I was on attachment.