Welcome!
My name is Femke and I am a Dutch national, who moved to Edinburgh 14 years ago. I have been working for the University of Edinburgh for the last five years, in the Edinburgh Medical School as an administrator.
Education has always interested me, but with a degree in History, Medical Education is not the easiest subject to contribute to. However, the last 9 months have given me the opportunity to get more involved with the teaching that takes place. I work for the Clinical Educator Programme, a programme providing CPD for clinical teachers and I have organised the Edinburgh Summer School in Clinical Education since 2016 (although we had to cancel this in 2020).
I have really enjoyed being able to get involved with teaching and thinking about the delivery of the teaching and I was lucky enough to be awarded a scholarship from the IAD to take part in IDEL. I look forward to learning more about Digital Education and to use the knowledge I gain to improve the programmes that I work for.
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Hi Femke and welcome to blogging for IDEL!
Thanks for the first introduction post. You may find it helpful to reflect on any specific aspects of digital environments for learning you hope to address through this course. This can be a useful post to return to later in the course.
The blog provides an opportunity for an open reflective dialogue between the two of us. It’s almost like a cross between keeping a diary and having a chat with a lecturer at the end of a class. This means that your ideas don’t have to be fully formed, and properly argued and fully evidenced (though it’s fine if they are!) in your posts. So don’t be afraid to be speculative and just record your immediate thoughts on what is happening. I will, however, make comments on good academic writing practice where I think this will be helpful, especially as we move closer towards the assignment.
You might want to consider scheduling time to make your blog entries. Around two or three entries a week is ideal. They don’t necessarily have to be very long; often there’s an excellent ‘nugget’ in a two-line entry that can be picked up again later. You might also want to be experimental – you don’t have to submit every entry for assessment, so if you change your mind that’s OK. You might find audio, video, images, hyperlinks etc to help you to express your ideas – so don’t be afraid to have some fun in the process.
I’ll check in on the blogs once or twice each week. So you should be hearing from me fairly regularly, but it might be a couple of days between your post and my response. I’ll add comments (as here) and comment on anything of particular interest and I’ll definitely be reading them all. You don’t have to reply to my comments, but you can if you want.
You can set your blog up to send you an email notification when a comment has been made. Just go to Dashboard/ Settings/ Discussion and select your preferred options for “Email me whenever”. Around week 5-6 we’ll have a mid-blog review, looking at the blog brief, the assessment criteria, what you have done so far and what you could do further when thinking about the assessment angle of the blog. I’ll be asking you to tell me what I can do further to help you, as well.
While the blog is set to be viewable by just ourselves, you can also allow all specific posts to be viewable by all students and staff on the course. This is described in the Technologies handbook here. Also, someone else will look at the final version of your blog in order to moderate my marking.
Anyway, well done for getting started and I look forward to reading more – I do particularly enjoy this aspect of the course. Any questions, please do email me directly at peter.evans@ed.ac.uk (or you can send me a message on the Moodle site).
Hi Peter, thank you for your comment. It is nice to ‘meet you’ and I look forward to working together. Writing a blog is completely new to me and it feels a little strange, but I have always enjoyed writing, so I am sure I will get used to this medium as well!