Check the basics!

I have just spent several hours trying to work out why one particular aspect of a network configuration was not working. I was looking everywhere (or nearly everywhere as will become clear) for the problem and could just not see it.
I was even thinking that there was something fundamentally wrong with my carefully crafted addressing scheme. After banging my head against the brick wall for several hours it was starting to hurt!

Finally just when I was about to give up for the day, I spotted a really basic error in setting up the physical links between two of the routers. (If you are interested, I forgot to set the clock speed on one link). As soon as I put this right, everything started to work properly. I was kicking myself since I am always telling students to check the basics when troubleshooting.

Despite being really annoyed with myself for missing this, there are some positives that I can take away from the experience... The first is that I have looked really, really hard at my addressing scheme and it stood up to scrutiny. Another is that I did get there in the end and proved that the rest of the setup was OK.


And, as has already happened several times on this course, it has reminded me how my students must feel when wrestling with an exercise or assignment. As time went by and I couldn't make it work and was getting more and more tired, I was seriously starting to lose confidence in myself.

I was reminded of a situation when a student was trying to get a particular function of a website working and not getting very far. We had exchanged various emails as they tried to resolve the situation and eventually agreed to meet the next day to see if I could spot the problem. When I checked my email the next morning I found one from the student time-stamped around 2:00am with a subject line along the lines of "Yippeee!". They had persevered and eventually made the breakthrough themselves. At the end of the module, they referred to that episode as one of the positives because they had learnt so much from it!

So, rather a frustrating afternoon but ended on a high!

Nice citation app

In an attempt to practice what I preach, I have been trying to use some non-internet sources for another question in the first assignment where we have to compare several routing protocols.

I popped into the library at Glyndwr University to look at some books and was able to use a rather nifty Android app that I had downloaded the previous day. It's called CiteThis and it allows you to scan the barcode on the back of a book. It then searches the internet to find the details of the book and prepares a correctly formatted citation for you. You can organise citations into folders which is great for multiple assignments. You can then email the list of citations to yourself!

We have to use Harvard referencing but the app will also handle Chicago, APA, AMA & MLA (whatever they are...). I am not sure that the formatting is 100% what the OU want but it will be close enough that I will be able to tweak it easily.

For the princely sum of £0.64 I am well pleased!

Getting started on the first assignment

There seems to be quite a lot of assessment on this course. As an HE tutor, I have quite often heard external examiners saying at exam boards that students are over assessed. Well, no-one seems to have said that to the Open University! We have 3 Tutor Marked Assessments plus a Residential School day plus an exam!


Anyway, getting started on this assignment has been quite hard going. I can't mention any specifics but the first task is to create an IP addressing scheme for a scenario. So far, so good but there is considerable scope for different interpretations of the information in the scenario. Given that this is a post-graduate course, I am hoping that this "flexibility" is deliberate and designed to get us thinking and justifying our choices.


Because this is my very first assignment at this level, I don't really have a feel for the required standard and suspect that I might have over-thought some aspects. However, it has been a salutary reminder of what my HE students must feel when they see their first assignments.


Anyway, I finally managed to break the logjam and start getting something down onto the paper. That was the key because, while I still had to go back and change some aspects as new thoughts occurred to me, I have gradually inched forward. This evening, I think that I have completed the addressing scheme and am hoping that the configuration part of the assignment goes a bit more quickly!


At least I am not alone in my uncertainty as discussion on the module forum shows. Discussing the options and interpretations on the forum has been useful as explaining and defending your interpretation helps clarify your understanding. I, for one, quite like the online discussion as it gives me time to think through the arguments before responding. I know that some people don't see online discussions as "real" communication but I beg to differ!

What's the course and why am I doing it?

The course is initially a Postgraduate Diploma in Advanced Networking with the Open University. This consists of 4 modules studied over two years and basically embeds the Cisco CCNP curriculum. After that I can do a dissertation in order to achieve an MSc in Advanced Networking.

I have just completed the Cisco CCNA Exploration course which I studied in an evening class at Coleg Llandrillo where I work as an IT tutor. I teach networking on a Foundation Degree in IT Support and on OCR course called Procomm so thought that the CCNA course would be a good way to formalise my previously self taught networking knowledge. Well, it certainly did that! It was a lot more detailed than I expected and gave me a lot more confidence in teaching the subject.

As I was nearing the end of the CCNA course, I started wondering "what next?".

 Several years ago, I had started a Masters Degree at Chester University but had not found it very satisfactory and withdrew after a few weeks. Leaving aside the quality of the teaching(...) another big issue was the travel time to get to classes.

I still had the idea of studying for a Masters in a Computing subject. My first degree is in European Business Administration which comes in remarkably useful but isn't a computing degree. I have gathered a few vendor certifications but nothing at HE level.

I did look at distance learning (to avoid the travel issues) but it always seemed very expensive. For some reason, the one provider that I had not considered was the Open University. I can't remember how I stumbled across them this time but it may have been while browsing for CCNP courses (the next stage after CCNA) which I would not have been looking for on the previous occasions.

Anyway, compared to other providers, the OU cost seemed quite reasonable and I decided to go for it. At this stage, I hadn't even considered approaching my employer for support which was a bit daft really... Anyway after having registered for the first module, I mentioned it to my line manager who immediately suggested that I talk to staff development. To cut a long story short (too late...) they were very helpful and able to provide financial support which is really pleasing.

So, I find myself at the start of a 3 year (minimum) journey towards an MSc. It's the first time since I completed my PGCE that I have studied a proper academic course with written assignments and, to be honest, it's a bit of a shock to the system! But more of that in another post...

Open University studies

I have recently started an Open University course and am going to use this blog that I set up some time ago to record CPD as a learning journal.

As an HE lecturer myself, I am always encouraging my students to reflect on their learning so I had better practice what I preach!

Need to sleep now but later I want to cover why I am doing this course, initial impressions of the course, my surprise at how hard it seems, first glimmers of optimism today, how the process of studying will help me identify with my students, how technology has moved on since I studied my PGCE and no doubt other things as well...