Wiki mania

Attended "what is a wiki" course earlier this week, run by Leigh (EDC) and Helen from the Learning Centre. Informative and enlightening - I think I finally get the idea of how things are to be set out for us.

The outline is above and I suppose for me it was actually seeing this in a visual form rather than looking at just the wiki development site(linked to this blog). In summary the only piece of the wiki students will see (unless they want to know the origin of resources, is the activity sheets. These are how students will apply the theory part of the programme and gain a fuller understanding of what they are doing. We will also make this blog available to run beside the activity sheets and use as another learning resource - in that whoever is teaching can provide extra resources and instructions through the blog. Assessment will be carried out separately.

I am also interested in looking at the introduction of Second Life (I am presently working through the tutorial which hopefully will tell me how to embed its URL as a link. http://secondlife.com/ Did it.

From next week on will be able to concentrate fully on the specialist subjects of the programme as am hoping to finish work on the core skills by Wednesday.

Have been working on the core of the diploma within the tour guiding taster section. Its really interesting as Karen (our tour guide from Queenstown) has provided some great information - so its been all about where to put it under the umbrella of unit standards. She has listed performance criteria eg. Unit 5678 PC 1.2 in some instances which is great but I have been trying to sort which of the information should be retained here in the core or go onto the specialist tour guiding area. Which is why I put this photo of containers at a Tunisia market on this posting.

I have decided (news for Leigh) I would like Leigh to provide the t&t team with a visual presentation of what we have been doing and where we are going, before the end of the semester. I don't think they are reading this blog and it is extremely difficult to get us all together for a regular meeting on development.

I will continue to work on the tour guiding core which has to be completed within two weeks - am starting to look at teaching resources and some lesson plans. The difficulty is finding a good stretch of uninterrupted time where you can really get into it.

Adventurous Development

A friendly yellow-eyed penguin at Taieri Mouth


Meet today with Leigh (EDU) and Andy Thompson (School of Adventure) to discuss working together to develop electives which would be of benefit to both tourism and adventure.

We discussed the term "Adventure Tourism" and its many definitions. From our point of view I felt it was more to do with providing students with a taster of what was available from tourism operators in NZ eg. mountain biking, kayaking, snow boarding, climbing. This could be combined with some theoretical eco tourism papers.

We also looked at an elective which students from the adventure school would find beneficial. This would probably centre around tourism management papers and be delivered 80% online with block tutorial sessions.

Overall a successful session and one which we will both be able to build on.

Progress

Yesterday two members of the travel and tourism team,(at out team meeting) Lynn and Sue bought up the possibility of creating an elective which would allow students to complete the external City & Guilds examination attached to our other programme (which we are no running next year). Their thinking behind this was that students would have the opportunity to gain an international qualification. This would be another point of difference for us from other providers and definetly should be looked into. Which we will do.

Leigh, Karen and I are having a skypecast today to discuss our progress.

Wikieducator

Refer to the wikieducator link to the tour guiding page and below are the five unit standard titles we have included for ease of maintenance and updating, collaboration with other institutions and international networking and Leigh's contribution is to add free and open learning for developing countries.

How visitors learn from interpretation, and evaluate interpretive techniques
Prepare and implement an interpretation plan for tourist attractions, activities and events
Manage health and safety in a tourism context
Demonstrate leadership skills in a tour context
Knowledge of visitor interpretation
Retrieved from "http://wikieducator.org/Tour_Guiding"

New Developer

I am really excited about taking on a new developer to help with the tour guiding elective in DATT.

Karen Jackson who is presently working as a tour guide in Queenstown has agreed to do some work for us. Just to be able to tap into her past and present practical experience is great. Welcome Karen!

Leigh and I have met with Karen at the polytech and plan to go to Queenstown overnight in the first week of May as a follow up.

New blog

We have created a new blog and I will migrate all of the information from our previous blog.