only connect - starting out - DETAIL

On this page I will attempt to outline the starting points for both the project and dissertation in more detail. It's currently very difficult to actually see all of the areas where these two focuses meet and divide, so there won't be much attempt to say what goes where. At this point the actual content of the dissertation is very much dependent on the outcomes of the project.

			What's out?

Even in the early planning stages it became clear that there was huge potential in running such a project and there was a great temptation to stuff it full of everything I, and then the tutors, students and others, might think of. Due to scale and resources some things had to be let go from the start, but these are important areas for future development projects and research. Involving Schools Many of the students receiving home tuition keep in close contact with their schools, or should do. The idea is that the school, usually via the home tutor, but sometimes directly, continues to provide work for the student with the idea of keeping them in step as much as possible with their peers. There's some good reasons for this; it keeps the momentum up, it might reduce the feeling of isolation and otherness in the students, it makes possible return to school less fraught and so on. It's clear that giving this process access to the communications channels in Only Connect could provide some further advantages to the setting and receiving of work - possibly providing greater synchronisation with the students former class as well as having potential social advantages. However, despite its obvious advantages there were big problems from the project's point of view. First was the fact that this kind of support is, in reality, patchy at best - though it might be said that Only Connect is just the sort of shot in the arm it needs. Added to that rather shaky start we have the potentially huge increase in the number of people and organisations involved with all the additional administration, training, tracking and evaluation that implies; I simply didn't see it as a practical proposition. Existing Tutors The choice of students and tutors was left to Liz McQueen at DCC. We wanted to give ourselves a mixture of circumstances so we had two tutors with students, some of whom they already taught, some they didn't. While this brings its own problems (as noted in the entries on Model 2 in the Progress>Tutors page) it was decided that there would be no direct formal link with the other home tutors who were peripherally involved as tutors of the chosen students. Again, this is to do with the scale of the task more than anything else. However, the other tutors were accessed as an informal resource to get some background on the students and they were also kept informed where possible of what was happening; but, they had no direct input into the project. Very High Tech Yesterday's hi-tech is tomorrow's common-place. However, today's hi-tech, while full of promise for a project like Only Connect, is a mine-field of half-baked ideas, beta versions and vapour-ware. While I flirted briefly with the idea of audio and even video conferencing for instance, this presented just another huge bunch of 'things-to-go-wrong'. Considering the sample population of students and tutors, not to mention the likely levels of equipment I was likely to get hold of, it soon became a basic rule of the project to use only that which was tried and tested, stable and easy to use. Once it became clear that the DCC-provided machines wouldn't even have sound cards or CD ROM drives this put the cap on it. Indeed, it was necessary to obtain an old version of AOL to even get basic facilities running on the DCC machines.