Design and Technology
My Own Personal Yellow Brick Road
02.15.2011
Audit Analysis

The skills audit is all about developing competences in my subject area, so to be able to rate my development I needed to try and define competence. As I mentioned before I had had a go at this definition back at the start of the course and the information I gathered formed the introduction to my audit document. The extract can be found here in the post on ‘What is Competence?’.

This initial definition then fed into my system of rating my knowledge and performance:

Levels of Competency

 No previous knowledge                                                                        1

This rating indicates that I have either never heard of this subject area or that I have no knowledge beyond a vague notion that it exists.

Begun to address                                                                                 2

I have started looking into the area and understand basic terminology and techniques; I have not put this knowledge into practice.

Understand the theory, some working experience                                3

I have a good knowledge of terminology and techniques; I have begun to experiment with putting this knowledge into practice. I am happy to attempt to pass on this knowledge through discussions/demonstrations.

Knowledge and experience confident                                       4

I am confident in this subject area, I have experimented with a range of techniques/methods and I have expanded my theoretical knowledge. I would be confident in teaching/demonstrating this knowledge to others.

Expert                                                                                                  5

This indicates that I feel totally comfortable in this subject area, I have extensive knowledge and experience in both my own practice and in teaching others.

I used this rating method to judge my initial competence in each subject area and as I have worked through the projects from last semester I have updated my progress to reflect knowledge and experience gained. Now that I have reached the halfway point in this process I can look back and see what has improved and what needs work. My aim by the end of this year is to be able to bring each of these areas up to at least a level 3.

 
 
 
After looking through each section and reassessing my competence I have updated my ongoing performance. As you can see from the tables above I have made huge additions to my knowledge and experience from my initial competences but there are still areas that are lacking, many of which are in the area of systems and control. This is unsurprising as I still feel just a teeny bit inadequate in this area (OK little bit of an understatement there…).
 
After working through the Keypad Safe Project I have a better understanding of electronics and electronic systems but I am still more than likely to pick up a component and have no idea of its name or function, circuit schematics still have the gleeful (and somewhat malicious) ability to confound me.  
 
Of course there are areas of subject knowledge out side of systems and control that also need working on but after looking into the areas that they relate to in my other major project this sesmeter and assessing the time available for mini tasks I’m confident that I can cover them.
 
So electronics it is… I am aware that it is a huge area to cover but the subject skills are so interlinked that in investigating one area e.g. components I could cover others e.g. prototyping techniques, software for circuit simulation etc. Right, back off into the land of OZ we go…
 
 

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