The Higher Education Academy Centre for Bioscience Pedagogic Research in the Biosciences day conference brought together about thirty academics, for the most part Bioscience specialists, who have been involved to educational research. The day turned out to be highly informative and thought provoking. Some on the hoof reflections were collated via Twitter – click this link.
To send is no guarantee of (meaningful) receipt
I was chastised recently (and rightly so) for failure to respond to an e-mail sent by a colleague. It did set me thinking, however, about a possible analogy between e-mail and teaching. This may be old hat, so apologies if I’ve reinvented the round thing with tyres.
People tend to make the assumption when an e-mail has been sent that it has been received, but there may be several ways in which this doesn’t hold true. Firstly, it may not have been delivered at all – wrongly addressed perhaps (there’s a new student same surname, same initial just started at Leicester and they’ve kindly forwarded mail misdirected to them, though they need not have done so). Secondly, there may be some technical glitch – machine failure, necessary disconnection of PC whilst moving house/office, etc. Thirdly, the message may have made it successfully to the mailbox, it may even have been opened, but not to the grey matter of the recipient.
It’s this third example of the lack of – meaningful - receipt that struck me as most analagous to teaching. We can stand at the front of a lecture theatre “sending off e-mails” of the finest quality in the form of our lecture content, but there is no guarantee that this content is being received. Even if the student is present, and has signed the register to prove it, the message we are sharing may not elicit the response that was intended/expected. There may just be too much going on in their mental mailbox for our nuggets to be deemed to have the worth we attached to them.
I’m still working on how the analogy stretches to the other versions – failure to turn up to a session would be in there, as an example of the second sort, I guess. Any suggestions?
Helping students improve their referencing practice
Appropriate citation of source documents is a key element in all academic writing. As anyone involved in the teaching of undergraduates will know, however, suitable ways of organising reference lists, and conventions for highlighting within the new text the points at which the sources have been used, are not always intuitive.
Colleagues and students may therefore be interested in an online tutorial about referencing that has recently been launched at the University of Leicester.
The student reference guide is the latest online tutorial produced at Leicester
DVD storage ideas – here’s one I prepared earlier
As someone who regularly uses off-air recordings of TV programmes in my teaching (see BioethicsBytes), I’ve generated quite a library of DVDs which have been knocking around for a while in a series of boxes. With storage of the discs being in need of a bit of rationalisation, I bought an allegedly purpose-designed CD/DVD unit from a high street store. (We won’t embarrass them by naming them, but the shop sounds very like the boat on which Jason and his pals set off in search of the Golden Fleece). It turned out that the system of pre-drilled holes allowed the shelves to be arranged for CDs or for mixed media, but could not be made to work in any sensible manner for DVDs alone.
I finally decided to take the solution into my own hands, and in the best Blue Peter tradition I decided that with the aid of a little sticky-backed plastic the solution was much closer to home. I’m very please with the outcome, so I offer you the following practical suggestions.
University of Leicester = University of the Year
The University of Leicester has been awarded the title University of the Year 2008 by the Times Higher.
Q: What’s the connection between the Prime Minister and undergraduate students?
Answer: neither empties their mailbox fast enough. This would be funny, except I’m trying to exercise my democratic right regarding the most important bioethics legislation in a generation and being thwarted by the technology.
democracy... undelivered
UPDATE (22nd October): I tried on more than ten occasions over a 24 hour period to have this message delivered, all to no avail. I’m not trying to pass the buck here, I know I should have got my act together and sent a letter in plenty of time. My point is this – if this is an advertised route via which the PM can be contacted then it ought to work. I can quite understand if the mailbox is inundated with pleas on all manner of issues. But if it is not a functional service then it should be very clear, for example in the autoresponse, that this is not the way to contact the Prime Minister rather than a message that implies you could and should try again later.
FURTHER UPDATE (22nd March 2009): The BBC reports that the Number 10 have now withdrawn the capability to e-mail the Prime Minister (see Number 10 gets rid of PM’s e-mail)
Going Dutch – all things video at DIVERSE2008
The beginning of July 2008 found me in Haarlem, Holland for the DIVERSE2008 conference. Having been to DIVERSE2006 (at Glasgow Caledonian), I knew the title was an acronym, but whenever I’d been asked what it stood for I replied “I’m not sure, but I do know that the V is for Video and one of the Es is for Education”. It turns out that although I had the gist of it, even this info was inaccurate – DIVERSE stands for Developing Innovative Visual Educational Resources for Students Everywhere, another entry in the pantheon of contrived and convulated names!
I do like the DIVERSE crowd – their backgrounds are as varied as the acronym implies (although Dutch and English are the predominant nationalities). What the delegates have in common is an interest in the use of video technologies in education. Applications can be quite varied; there’s a strong video-conferencing strand (which isn’t really my thing) but I picked up sessions in all four of the parallel themes: pedagogy and assessment; tools and content orientated applications; projects and cases – implementation and sustainability; and people and technology – societal aspects. This year’s event included a demonstration of a live cello masterclass with the instructor in Holland teaching a pupil in America via Internet2, a high-quality connection. Read More…
Preventing and Designing out Plagiarism
On 8th April 2008, the University of Leicester played host to conference organised by the Centre for Bioscience of the Higher Education Academy (Editorial note: apologies it took so long to get this post up – it was an excellent day conference so I hope you’ll find the material still relevant. More notes can be seen at the official Centre for Bioscience summary of the event).
Cooking the books?
First up was Fiona Duggan from the JISC Academic Integrity Service. Fiona started by highlighting recent discussion in the media about Delia Smith’s book How to cheat at cooking – is it really “cooking” to use frozen mash? Computer games have built in capacity to “cheat”. Are these symptomatic of a change in the acceptability of cheating in society?
Mark my words!
Halfway through an epic marking marathon my journey is lightened by the occasional inadvertent gem. Here’s a couple from the current crop:
“They went to university collage hospital” – presumably they were in pieces about something or other
“Another unique property of stem cells is that they have the capacity of diving without differentiating for long periods of time” – Jacques Cousteau would have been impressed
Marking, remarking and meaningful learning
“Marking, remarking and meaningful learning: an assessment and feedback seminar” was held at the University of Leicester on April 4th 2008. The event was organised by the Assessment and Feedback Working party of the University’s Student Experience Enhancement Committee and was attended by about 60 members of the academic community. The following are personal reflections and things that I took from the day.
Smartie-pants
The first presentation was given by Jon Scott, Director of Studies in Biological Sciences at the University. Jon’s cryptic title “How the baby got the Smartie” actually drew analogies between his research work on development of motor coordination skills and effective use of feedback. The ability of a baby to pick up a smartie from a flat surface is apparently a developmental landmark (presumably there are healthy options now available for choco-phobic parents). Research on brain activity whilst learning this task has shown that neurons are fired by failure to achieve the task, i.e. whilst the infant is self-feedbacking (is that a word?) . It knows what it is expecting (bright, interesting-looking object in mouth) and feedback modifies performance until it gets it. Once the task has been mastered, apparently, the relevant neurons go silent.
