Induction Week

A strange mixture of feelings.

It's odd to be studying at postgraduate level again when all I've done in recent decades is have babies & potter about at level 1 & 2 doing hobby courses & now suddenly I have to be all grown up & serious. Heck, I wasn't much more than a kid myself last time I did anything like this!

Apprehension & a sense of inadequacy creeping in when I read my fellow students' intros & the throwaway line in the induction materials that suggests most people will be coming to this course after other MA modules, ready-equipped with a sound knowledge of learning theory.

Doubts as to whether I'll have time to do justice to such a rich course when my working life has just become impossibly busy.

Tried to kill two birds with one stone by putting some of the day's frustrations into a response to my first tutorial activity, replying to a fellow student's reflections on the effects of connectivity on learning organisations:

Having spent much of today troubleshooting the messes that can arise when various sections of a supposedly connected organisation fail to communicate effectively with each other, I share your ambivalence. It seems to me that connectivity alone isn't enough; there needs to be co-ordination, too. Distributed knowledge can mean we each hold our own little portion of knowledge & the big picture is lost.

I'm not really as cynical as this message makes me sound, just more keenly aware of possible dysfunctionality today than usual.

I've started, so I'll finish!