Blog#2 (the titles will - OK, may - improve!)

Work
Last week, along with Diana Eastcott and Jan Tennant, I taught on - facilitated - whatever we call it - the 9th SEDA Summer School for Staff and Educational Developers at the beautiful Cumberland Lodge in the spectacular and ancient Windsor Great Park.
The 22 participants persuaded me, as happens every year at the Summer School, that the future of staff and educational development is in safe, vigorous, thoughtful hands. They also showed me the phenomenal diversity of work being done under the banner of 'staff and educational development'. Which set me thinking:
- We know quite a bit about the structures and functions of educational development units (Gosling 2008) -
- We also know something about how people become staff and educational developers (see many issues of the International Journal for Academic Development - IJAD).
- But I'm not sure we know enough about the range of development work that is being done, under, partly under and outside the umbrella, sunshade (metaphor overload alert!!!) of 'staff and educational development'.
So:
What are people who identify themselves as staff and educational devlopers actually doing?
Does anyone know of a study into what they do?
Any thoughts on what the real research questions here might be?
Any thoughts on how to do the study?

Life
The heron is pretending to fish in the top lake. Not fooling me - there are no fish there.

Other stuff
Blogspot is a decent blogsite but not a good word processor. Writing in Word produces .html that needs a lot of cleanup before blogspot will take it. I'm writing this as an Outlook Note. I'll report on how it works. Someone must already have solved this problem!

Blog#1

Introduction This is an experiment. If it works, it works.

I’ll normally use one, two or three of the following headings. They should cover most of it.

Work
It was nice when a note I wrote about reflective competence for Businessballs.com http://www.businessballs.com/consciouscompetencelearningmodel.htm was picked up in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscious_competence and nicer still when a Canadian psychologist wrote to me about it and we explored how the idea might work in helping people to unlearn unproductive behaviours. It may not have the kudos of formal publication, but it beats waiting 18 months from acceptance to publication!

Life
They are pumping out the top lake again. The lake leaks, and the fountain, which at its highest reaches around 20 feet, is usually down to about 6 inches by the end of the day.
A new crop (?) of ducklings is skittering about on the mud, nibbling on the drying algae and squeaking almost ultrasonically.

It smells a little like the seaside.

Some of the geese have just walked up from the lower lake, wondering why their holiday pool is down to a third of its normal size.

Other Stuff
Missing words - first in an occasional series.
I think we need another word to mean part of what we currently mean by 'my'.
"My car" - possession - OK
"My children" - "my partner" - association, mutual affection, mutual responsibility - but absolutely not possession.
I think it matters because the 'possession' meaning of 'my' can contaminate the 'association' meaning. You can solve the problem by rephrasing, but it needs pretty drastic rephrasing.
Any suggestions?