Educause Greetings

Note: This article was originally posted in the Connect section on the Educause Web site, at:

http://connect.educause.edu/blog/pault/greetings/2444. 

However, this address has since become inaccessible, so the post has been reproduced here as an archive with the same date and, where known, the same time. 

Hello.  Allow me to introduce this blog (and indirectly myself).

Let's start with the title, 'Educational Rice Grains.'   I'm not 'faculty' (or an 'academic,' as we say in the UK), but am employed in IT support services in the Learning Techologies Group at Oxford University Computing Services, mainly to run a centrally hosted Learning Management System called WebLearn .  However, I have a fundamental interest in education in terms of drawing out the whole person (as in the closely related term educe), though paradoxically I see the processes to do this require going deeper inwards.  So whilst the content will most likely refer to instructional technologies, particularly the LMS we run, it'll also relate to other areas in education that may be independent of technology.

Why 'rice grains'?  My contributions are small, but I hope can be part of universal food for the mind and I'm half Thai, so rice really is part of my staple diet :-)  I'm hoping also that some Oriental cultural aspects may be reflected in these writings.  Further, ideas presented in a single post may be fragmentary; only until several posts might we have something substantial enough for a complete meal.

This is not my first blog; a combination of factors have led to my setting up here:

• Stuart Yeates, a colleague at the other end of the building, suggested some while back that I might blog here
• I've recently registered for Educause 2006
• My previous work blogs - on Pault@LTG and the RAMBLE Project - have come to an abrupt halt, so I need somewhere else to log, reflect and so on.

Whether my postings are irregular or infrequent, I hope you find them of some interest.