Using BoB & TRILT for Academic Research

BoB (sometimes referred to as “Box of Broadcasts”) and TRILT (the Television and Radio Index for Learning and Teaching) are powerful online repositories relating to broadcast media in the UK. Primarily designed for teaching, TRILT has extensive records about millions of programmes, and BoB provides means to stream more than three million TV and radio recordings.

For a number of years, I have been working with final year undergraduates to explore the potential of BoB and TRILT as tools for academic research, primarily on the representation of different aspects of biomedicine. This led into a PhD position for Holly Large and further refinement of our methodology. That approach is now sufficiently mature that we were invited to produce a “how to” guide, and to present this at a launch event. The guide:

The guide is now available at this link [EDIT: 28th February 2024: I am aware that this link is not currently working, as the Learning on Screen site has migrated to a new address and not all resources have yet been carried across. The links to slides and video below are, however, working].

The launch event, organised by Learning on Screen, took place in London on 23rd September. In addition to our presentation (see below), there were also talks by Prof. Kathy Conklin (School of English) and Dr Walter van Heuven (School of Psychology) on the potential use of subtitles and transcripts of television broadcasts to investigate the relationship between language exposure and language processing, and from Dr Giles Bergel from the Visual Geometry Group at the University of Oxford, who considered future uses of visual AI tools combined with BoB.

Following a panel discussion, the event finished with a wine reception.

The slides of our presentation are available here. A video is available via this link and below:

Slides:

Video:

How to Use BOB and TRILT for Research from Learning on Screen on Vimeo.

Discussing Ethics of Direct-to-Consumer Genetic

On Tuesday 7th December I had the honour to talk with 900 sixth form students in person, and a further several hundred online. The event was one of a series organised by Education in Action, and took place at the spectacular Emmanuel Centre in Central London.

An amazing venue at which to speak.
Photo courtesy of The Compton School

I’ve spoken at some of their meetings previously, and I’ve spoken about the Ethics of Direct-to-Consumer with postgraduate students before, but never this topic with this age range. I therefore did quite a bit of work in advance to not only simplify some aspects, but try to make the connections to their courses more overt. I put in four Slido polls – the first and the final one were paired, and asked the delegates if they’d consider having a DTC genetic test themselves. The middle two probed their a priori knowledge about the human genome. The action shot, above, catches me revealing the outcome of a poll which revealed that the majority of students knew how many base pairs there are in our chromosomes, but interestingly fewer knew that only a minute amount of our DNA actually codes for proteins.

The Education in Action team did a terrific job with the presentation practicalities; screens for the benefit of the speaker showed the live poll results coming in before they were revealed to the participants, and they were very efficient at toggling between different feeds at the right time. They also managed to get a live audience mike out at short notice and a prominent speaker clock helped keep everyone to time. If you ever get invited to present at one of these days then jump at the chance. And if you are a school teacher looking for some engaging para-curricular content for your students then I do recommend these days, as they’re great.

Take-home messages from “Practical Pedagogy”

On Monday 13th September I joined several hundred academics for the “Practical Pedagogy” conference. The virtual event (held using Teams) was organised by Chris Headleand from University of Lincoln. The programme was jam packed with interesting stuff.

With three parallel sessions all day (and no scheduled breaks) there were inevitably choices to be make about which sessions to attend. However, for the most part, I was pretty pleased with the selections I made. What follows are some reflections/notes on a few of the stand-out presentations.

First up, Liz Mossop, Deputy Vice Chancellor for Student Development and Engagement at the University of Lincoln, offered us Some New (Academic) Year Resolutions. These included:

• Cast the net wider – in terms of engagement with broader demographics, and ensuring that we are in listening mode not just broadcasting to them.
• Rethinking decision-making – one ‘bonus’ of the pandemic was the need for institutions to be agile in adapting to the new circumstances. Let’s not slip back into the mire of “university treacle” in which even minor changed get bogged down in bureaucracy.
• Evaluate communication approaches – clear communication (Centre to staff, Centre to students, staff to students, etc) is vital, but was not always a strength during the pandemic.
• Influence what I can, let go of what I can’t – this is a crucial one for me. I can only change the things that are within my sphere of influence, to try and alter other things is a waste of time and saps our emotional energy. If we focus on the things we can change, sometime the impact will percolate to the things we could not initially affect.
• Focus on *who* we want to be, not *what* we want to be – this is true at both the institutional and the individual level. Our values are ultimately more important than our activity.

8 Things (Science) Lecturers Need to Know About the Students Arriving at University this Autumn

At the end of April, the regular #DryLabsRealScience online Community of Practice meeting was given over to presentations about the experience of current Year 13 (A level) students. Three secondary school Science teachers (two in person, and one in absentia) provided fascinating, and at times depressing, insights into the students who are going to be joining university courses in Autumn 2021. The following reflections and observations inspired by the event may prove useful in shaping our plans to offer them the best opportunity to flourish.

The why and how of teaching ethics to bioscience students

In July 2019 I was involved in a session on The Why and How of Teaching Ethics to Bioscience Students. I was a panellist, along with Professors Lynne Sneddon (from the University of Liverpool, UK) and Prof Ros Gleadow (from Monash University, Australia). I recently became aware that the session is available on YouTube.

My short talk on our approach to ethics teaching in Biosciences at Leicester starts about 16 minutes in (here), but listening to the session afresh I would encourage you to listen all the way through.

Embracing the potential of digital exams

Horizons in STEM Higher Education has become a summer fixture for many science academics. In keeping with many 2020 events, this year’s conference switched to an online format. The first plenary lecture was Digital Exams: Transforming Assessment by Professor Mariann Rand-Weaver from Brunel University.

This was a really inspiring session, demonstrating the opportunities that are presented by actively moving examinations from a traditional paper-based format to using digital platforms.

Brunel has been moving to digital exams over the past few years (i.e. not just in response to recent pandemic), partly motivated by asking themselves why exams were almost the only time we ever ask students to hand write anything these days. Additionally, a switch to provision of computers is already a typical “reasonable adjustment” on accessibility grounds, so why not level the playing field by allowing this for all?

There are a range of benefits. For the markers it is easier to read typed scripts. The answers are often better structured, as the students can move around the text to the relevant point. There are also administration benefits – e.g. less paper , less manual handling, more streamlined processes.

Thirteen take-home messages from the Nuffield webinar on fair and equitable access to Covid-19 treatments and vaccines

On 5^th June 2020 I was privileged to be able to listen into the latest in a series of webinars on Covid-19 and ethics organised by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. Sharing the benefits of research: facilitating fair and equitable access to Covid-19 treatments and vaccines. The meeting, held on Zoom and chaired by Nuffield Director Hugh Whittall featured contributions from four experts, followed by a Q&A session. The panelists were: Stefan Swartling Peterson (Chief of Health at UNICEF); Ellen ‘t Hoen (Director of Medicines Law & Policy, and founder of the Medicines Patent Pool); Achal Prabhala (Coordinator of the AccessIBSA project, which campaigns for access to medicines in India, Brazil and South Africa); and Sheuli Porkess (Executive Director for Research, Medical and Innovation at the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI)).

What follows are my initial reflections on a terrific and informative session. I offer the caveat that I have not listened back to a recording of the meeting (though I gather one will be made available shortly). I am therefore working just from my ‘live’ notes and these points are likely a blend of what was actual said, things where I might inadvertently have got the wrong end of the stick, plus tangents towards which my brain spiralled at the time and in preparing these notes.

Avoiding Scientific Misconduct in Prague

I recently spent an excellent few days in Prague, attending the 43^rd FEBS Congress, at which I gave a talk about the importance of bioethics teaching, and ran a workshop on developing case studies in ethics teaching. A session on the final morning Scientific (mis)conduct: how to detect (and avoid) bad science illustrated one reason why this is a crucial dimension in the education of scientists.

I live-tweeted the presentations and organised them at the time within five threads. The post below represents a first attempt to use Thread Reader (@threadreaderapp) which operates a very straightforward “unroll” tool. Following the sad demise of Storify, I was curious to see if this would be a suitable alternative for curation of tweeted content. I have elected to offer both links to the unrolled threads and screenshots of the resulting notes. I’m relatively pleased with the outcome.

Getting back to the content of the session, it proved a really insightful overview of several aspects of research misconduct, and publication ethics.

Taking part in a Twitter-only conference: some reflections on #PressEDconf18

On 29th March 2018, I participated in the Twitter-based conference, #PressEDconf18. Those who follow me on Twitter (@cjrw) may know that I am an occasional contributor to the weekly Wednesday night #LTHEchat live discussion which has been running since 2014. I am also an enthusiastic live-tweeter at conferences, usually including the official Hashtag which allow for interested parties to follow what others are saying about the event as well as facilitating aggregation using the soon-to-be-sadly-missed Storify service.

This event was slightly different from a regular conference as there was no associated physical gathering. As keynote contributor Jim Groom noted, “I’ve been to conferences that used a hashtag, but this is my first conference that is a hashtag“.

Although this was not the first event to take this format, it was certainly one of the first, and it was interesting to be part of a pioneering approach. #PressEDconf18 was the brainchild of Natalie Lafferty (@nlafferty) and Pat Lockley (@Pgogy). The theme was educational uses of WordPress blogs (for full schedule see here). I submitted two proposals; they were in the format of a tweet, so it wasn’t an especially onerous task. One related to my use of a WordPress blog to host Careers After Biological Sciences, a repository of careers awareness resources built up over the past decade. The second was more generic advice for anyone considering starting up an educational blog. It was the latter that was accepted.

Biosummit 2017

The University of East Anglia (Norwich) was the venue for the annual Biosummit, a gathering of UK bioscientists with an active interest in pedagogic research. As usual there was much to reflect upon. A summary of the event is captured in this Storified summary of tweets. My own formal contribution was limited to reflections on the value of using the Royal Society of Biology’s CPD framework as a valuable mechanism for capturing the evidence of activity, and reflection upon that activity, which is increasingly required for appraisals, accreditation and applications. The slides from my talk are available below (and via this link).

This continues to be a bona fide “Community of Practice”. One of the highlights is seeing like-minded friends and catching up on what they’re doing in their lives as well as in their work. The content of the conference, however, remains central. This year there were a number of highlights for me.