Also, for a lot of people (at least four Melbourne-located Universities) there’s a list of places to publish in which are considered good, and that allows promotion. So publishing in those places is the agreed and implied employment role. Saying the labour is ‘for free’ might be a bit less accurate than say ‘leased out for prestige-building purposes’.

I say this as someone who -has- decided to publish a couple of iBooks with a group of like-minded academics and experiment with the magazine format. I’m making something and quite excited by how it will turn out. I don’t think its any better than dealing with traditional press models – though I’m certainly looking forward to having my work behind single-figure rather than four-figure paywalls.

While I could well achieve higher marks if I cared more, I’m quite happy with balancing passes and credits with my full-time career, since I know that once completed, the “bit of paper” is not much more than CV padding. It’s interesting to see comments from other students who are not yet teaching who are still stressing about their marks. I was like that once, while doing my pre-service training. Imagine how I felt when it turned out that none of the marks (or stress about them) mattered an iota when compared to competence and a good interview!

The lecturers also seem to share this great concern for academic marks, and keep trotting out “higher level” and the importance of “higher theory” in the course while being seemingly impervious to teaching teachers anything much useful for teaching.

The interesting thing is that while my Masters is highly theoretical and mostly a waste of my time (I see it as an annoying and painful investment, and at this point have mostly given up on learning anything practical or useful), I’ve recently spoken to other teachers doing their masters at a different university and they’ve gushed about how practical and useful their course has been!

Am I one “of you” or one of “the 22″? I suppose my mindset places me in the middle. If I’m going to accept money and the responsibility to be an educator, I need to meet them all halfway. At the very least,

But Freemind is not modular, as in – you can’t just move around the nodes arbitrarily on the page in most of the free applications. They’re bound to rigid diagrammatic structures (I think this is a function of the way the software is created at the code level).

The closest to a free-flowing app that I have seen is Xmind, which is proprietary (multi-platform though I’m not sure if it’s on iPad), but the free version allows some customisation. I want to be able to move all my shapes, scribbles, icons around to capture the essence of ideas. If you lose the thought trying to grapple with a poorly-designed UI then what’s the point?

Also, the old pencil and paper pad is my backup (media archaeologist). Some habits die hard. I scribble it down and then recreate it as close as I can in the software – sometimes that translation process is useful in the same way that academic writing spawns ideas.

As a result of reading what you said, I have been thinking of designing a feature (s) into the project whereby a person who wanted to come back would have a way of knowing, what they had viewed already. Perhaps this would be a bookmark of some type.

I know if a comment, like yours, has me feeling defensive, it means that it has special resonance for me and be a chance to evolve as a practitioner. I thank you for your “wake-up” call.