Friday, July 06, 2007

#WriteTimes and SQA

Demon has been updating my home page server and this looks like keeping these postings off -line for a week or two.

Spent a week in meetings and in recruiting staff. The organisation is going through that positive flex that any organisation goes through when a new chief executive arrives. We are both planning for next year and reviewing our current processes.

We recruited a new project manager to lead on English as a Second Language developments. A critical area for the Scottish economy currently.We have probably for the first time since the 1940's a large community of migrants who need to develop language skills quickly to work within the Scottish economy.

It was great to meet so many employers and training providers at the SQA Customer Conference on Thursday. It rolled well into SQA's celebration of 10 years with an event for current staff with 10 years service and for some of the staff who worked for SCOTVEC and the Scottish Examinations Board our predecessor bodies .

The organisation launched "Write Times" a celebration of all the great creative writing produced by candidates. The writers were present at the launch some really great and moving stuff in this modest publication.

2 comments:

N Winton said...

Hi Joe...
Great to find your blog (at last).
I got a copy of Write Times at the start of the holiday -- seems like a long time ago now!-- and have been dipping in from time to time. There is some superb writing in it, but I have to admit to some surprise that a handful of centres appear to have dominance of a few centres. Do you know if this was an editorial decision... or should we be looking to share some of the great ideas that these centres must be implementing?

Joe Wilson said...

I have had blogs on and off since 2000 and before that used some older tools around collaborative website development. We set up all Scot Fe communities on Jiscmail in the last century and did a lot to kick off all things online there.
Its great to see blogging has engaged school community. I think it is how we will write units etc in future.

SQA has lots of blogs and other stuff going on but I decided to switch this blog back on - in one way to let my team know where I am. I look after half the vocational portfolio and can be negotiating with NHS or Financial Houses or Executive around Sign Language or ESOL or .. list goes on - in any one week. I have some really exceptional staff leading in these sectors and it's a useful way to let them and others in educational community know what I am up to without being too official.

I just thought Write Stuff was such a great idea. I don't have answers for you - I did meet at the launch the writers/academics who did final selection for each section and I know they had done selection together.