Progress

The wiki is progressing as are our teaching resources. We have employed a new tour guiding lecturer - Nicky Snoyink. Nicky has a strong practical background in tour guiding and is a managing director of her own company "Travel Logistics". Maybe you would like to put in a posting about yourself Nicky?

I have set up another blog (Wordpress) to run alongside our tour guiding specialty which begins next semester. In the first instance it will be used so that lecturer's can get used to writing, editing and updating a blog and also for students who have missed a class and want to know where to find resources. You might say it will be operating in the same way as the announcement board in Blackboard.

Leigh and I are meeting weekly for 3hrs. This has worked well for me especially when it comes to using the wiki, getting ideas from him and letting him see the administration work that goes behind developing and running a programme simultaneously.

Resources

Am gathering resources for the Tour Guide specialty. One of our team members, Kevin Flaherty alerted me to a new article on Campbell Live, looking at tourism impacts, carbon credits etc. So have enquired with TV3 as to how we can have access to this video (without having to buy it) Have requested they place it on YouTube so we can use it as a classroom resource. It would be ideal viewing for our Diploma in International Tourism students, initially and then for use in the Diploma for Applied Travel and Tourism. Will wait to hear what feedback we get.

We are in the process of interviewing for a tour guide lecturer. The applicants are of the highest quality and it will be a tough decision. More on that after a successful appointment.

Am in the final stages of working with Karen (our tour guide from Queenstown) who is helping provide us with general information for the industry.

http://www.tv3.co.nz/VideoBrowseAll/CampbellLive/tabid/367/articleID/28774/Default.aspx#video?src=email

Plugging On

Things have been moving quickly on the development front - with the final section (Tour Guiding) of the programme core beginning this week with new resources in place and team members contributing to these with further resources - great. All work is being placed on a shared folder for easy access.

We are presently seeking a person with recent or present tour guiding experience to teach the tour guiding specialty (elective) which begins next semester. Looks as though there are some good candidates out there.

I am meeting with Dion Hyde from Hospitality tomorrow with the hope of future collaboration between our schools (Applied Business and Hospitality). More dedicated time will now be put to development with the hope that seven of the specialties will be completed by January 2008: tour guiding, travel operations, conference and events, adventure tourism, reception services, flight and cruise and tourism enterprises. This will leave tourism enterprises, wholesale travel, sustainable tourism for development in the first half of 2008 available in the second semester. Its going to be busy.

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.