August 24, 2012 - Bobby -
I “attended” a webinar yesterday morning, as part of E-Assessment Scotland’s online programme. It was an early start (8am) since it was also part of the Transforming Assessment project, which is run by a group of Australian universities (for whom it was 5pm). The webinar was entitled “Assessment and the Manifesto for Teaching Online”. It was very interesting and challenged many educational orthodoxies, such as emphasising the dangers of plagiarism, which the Manifesto claims will alienate learners. I gave a…
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August 17, 2012 - Bobby -
I was invited to give a talk to the staff of James Watt, Reid Kerr and Clydebank Colleges yesterday as part of a “Curriculum Sharing Day”. The event was hosted in James Watt College. I’ve previously encouraged centres to invite me, or one of my team, to visit their centres, so I was delighted to take up the invitation. Scott Campbell, of James Watt College, asked me to talk about the current range of Computing awards, what’s being developed for…
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August 14, 2012 - Bobby -
SQA aims to review each qualification every five years, and this year the National Certificate in Digital Media Computing and PC Passport (a National Progression Award) are due to be reviewed. Hilary and me had a kick-off meeting this morning to commence these large and important projects. The NC awards (at SCQF Levels 4, 5 and 6) are among the most popular non-advanced qualifications in Scottish colleges, and PC Passport is SQA’s most popular vocational Computing qualification, and one of…
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August 14, 2012 - Bobby -
I am a member of the Project Board for a new project aiming to enhance HN awards to make them more appropriate for progression to degree courses. There was a board meeting yesterday afternoon when we discussed the project’s tasks and timescales. The project will explore four subject areas, one of which is Computing, to see how the existing awards can be improved to make the transition from college to university easier for students. We will look at the structure,…
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August 14, 2012 - Bobby -
I attended a CoderDoJo event on Saturday morning, at the Science Centre in Glasgow. This initiative aims to encourage kids aged 10-16 to program. Twelve kids attended, aged between 10-14, all boys except for one girl. It was great fun. The kids are set challenges and allowed to work on a software project of their choice. A range of software development environments are available including HTML, Scratch, Python and Javascript. Some kids had programmed before but some were completely new…
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August 13, 2012 - Bobby -
Most colleges restart today. If you are one of the many Computing lecturers or teachers returning to their desks today, welcome back. The team hope you have a good year. I recently updated the vocational Computing portfolio diagram. You might want to download and print this diagram and keep it handy for reference. While I have management responsibility for the awards, Caroline and Hilary have operational responsibility, and the portfolio is divided between them. Basically, Hilary is the person to…
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August 10, 2012 - Bobby -
Me and my team try to attend Edinburgh Interactive Conference most years, given that it takes place at a relatively quiet time in the year. I attended the conference yesterday, and Hilary and Caroline will attend today and tomorrow. Attendees at the conference include representatives of Google (who also gave a presentation), Channel 4, Scottish Television and the UK Government. The conference focuses on computer games. The keynote, by Seamus Blackley, who was the man behind the development of the…
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I previously mentioned that a couple of EVs, led by the Senior EV, were looking at the current HN Graded Units to check them for clarity and consistency. We did this because EVs were reporting some inconsistency in the way centres were dealing with such things as the re-assessment of candidate’s projects. So this small team of EVs audited all of the current HN Graded Units (GUs) to check them for advice relating to re-assessment, autonomous working, and stage progression…
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We got our 400th follower on Twitter today. We started to use Twitter three years ago so that’s a reasonable following in a relatively short period of time. In fact, we decided to give Twitter a try after one of our annual team meetings, and it has clearly turned out to be worthwhile. Of course, I would like more people to follow us, since it’s a great way of keeping up to date with what we’re doing, so, if you…
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The summertime is a good time for the team to catch up with all of the things that fall behind during term time. The Computing team, in common with all SQA staff, have standard holidays so we work through the summer, but the place is a lot quieter with many staff on holiday and most centres closed for the holidays. So it’s a great time to catch up with unfinished work, and take stock of things. Last week we had…
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