Examining in Calgary

For the last week I've been examining piano students for RCM Examinations in Calgary. This is an exciting week, as I'm one of the beta testers of RCME's new online marking system. The students will definitely benefit from this new system of marking and adjudicating, as they'll be able to get their exam results mere days after playing their exams. Since the exam results are typed, students will be able to get a better sense of just how they did without having to wade through the examiner's handwriting (which in the case of my own, can be quite a chore). And while it's been a lot of fun working with the new RCME web app, each evening I get home to my hotel room in downtown Calgary and have no desire to do any blogging, since I've already been staring at a computer screen for over six hours.

Next week I'll be back to my regular blogging schedule, but this week it's been interesting to sit back and think about how the blogging process has changed. An article early today by Nick Bilton in the NY Times Bits blog looks at the way content curation has become one of the major blogging (and tweeting!) models of late. I can see that I've definitely moved in this direction over the last while. A quote from Bilton's interview with Maria Popova sums it up:

“I scour it all, hence the serendipity. It’s essentially ‘metacuration’ — curating the backbone, but letting its tentacles move freely. That’s the best formula for content discovery, I find.”

More interesting stuff to come in the next few weeks...