PGCHE 1st session on lecturing

Delivered my first proper session on our PGCHE on the topic of teaching in a lecture room with a focus on large groups. This is the first time I'd really delivered a content session on a PGCHE rather than facilitating and doing session on using our e-portfolio. We deliberately chose to deliver the session in a lecture room and I tried to deliver a 'good' lecture by showcasing various ways of engaging large groups of students in that environment and moving away from a passive delivery to exploring ways of making lectures more active, engaging etc. So a lecture on lecturing!!

My big concern beforehand was that overall it was going to be too didactic. I stacked lots of little activities at the beginning of the session to demo techniques that you could use in a lecture such as buzz groups, short writing activities, show of hands etc. interspersed between delivering the content. After about 30 minutes, I posed the question about what is a lecture? and a possible answer that it could be anything we wanted it to be. The consensus was that, so far, my lecture was not in fact a lecture at all! Which kind of surprised but then again not. There was clear evidence from some lecturers that the didactic, transmissive model was where they were at (which is fair enough if that is all they have known) and what I was doing was not that and therefore not a lecture! (the slides are here although the content of the session was more about how they were delivered rather than what was written on the slides.)

That attitude was all the things I hated 15 years ago as a student who had a miserable academic experience as an undergraduate and I guess the reason I do the job I do. At least now I am in a position where I can try and bring about a change in the perception of teaching in HE. The ideas were certainly challenging for some (which was deliberate). Thankfully others were already on the journey and onboard with the stance I had taken and to be fair the stance that is recognised as good practice (and has been for many years) in teaching in HE. Now, there is no criticism of colleagues who as yet don't get it, who still see a lecture as only about one-way delivery. I find it more damning, that after all these years, we still have a culture in HE that allows those views to be prevalent. If I had taught like that in my year 10 (14/15 year olds) classes in high school, there would have been chaos. My students would not have learnt anything. Yet a few years later these self-same students are now in our lectures at university. Yes they are more mature but are they any better at learning?

Anyway, I'm not going to dive into a rant rather I'll try not to injure myself by giving myself a pat on the back for a job well done. I console myself with the fact that real change in the affective domain, real change in behaviour is a painful and challenging process and if colleagues were challenged and found the ideas difficult then I did my job.

Thank you to those who were there for being attentive, thank you to those who have shown interest in this online, thank you to the course team for humouring this 'green' educational developer. And before I do a Gwyneth Paltrow, I shall stop!!

How best to communicate

Reflecting on @zephoria blog post on information overload and communicating with people. Which boiled down to "contact me via email if you want a reply as I can manage this information stream".
Thankfully I don't have as many people trying to communicate with me but having just spent the last hour communicating with different colleagues in different methods; email, twitter and IM. It does make you wonder about where it is all going to end up and that the only way to cope is either to have everything open whenever you are contactable or be able to feed it all in to a single management system (oh yeah that's probably email!!)

Technology, Teaching and learning

thx to @katiepiatt for this reference. An interesting read, useful model at end. Might be useful on PGCHE.

Boning up on my ed dev literature

Biggs: Constructive alignment - alignment between learning outcomes, teaching materials and assessment of student learning.
I like this little figure courtesy of South Bank Uni's LTE unit.

Outcome based education (OBE) or Outcomes Based Teaching and Learning (OBTL) - Often been used in 'confused' ways but focus should be on outcomes based solely on teaching and assessment. This is why we explicitly state our learning outcomes for the module.

Here is a nice concept map of constructive allignment and curriculum design courtesy of Houghton (2004), HEA engineering subject centre.

Underpinning all this of course is a constructivist approach to learning and notions of deep and surface learning etc. The focus should be on what students do. They are not passive recipients of knowledge.

Biggs and Collis SOLO taxonomy - Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes - about the level of complexity that an idea or concept is understood, from the pre-sctrutural (acquiring unconnected bits of information to the extended abstract with links understanding within and beyond the subject discipline, ie able to generalise and transfer knowledge (here is a great website that explains it). I think this is a very useful concept for portfolio building & PDP. Good portfolios are about making the links between experiences (and an understanding of them) and being able to learn general lessons that can be applied in the future.

Enough for now, back to work.

Random Collections

Some Thoughts on Technophilia from danah boyd, talks about the social context, nice quote "when we introduce technology in an educational setting, we often mistakenly assume that students will embrace the technology in the same way that we do."
The problem with asking survey questions, DO PEOPLE MEAN WHAT THEY SAY?
IMPLICATIONS FOR SUBJECTIVE SURVEY DATA. Might be a useful insight for dissertation students.

Moving from babyhood to the toddler years

Develop Me (http://developme.ning.com) now has over 700 members and still rising now! People are still logging on a daily basis and the University has used the site to consult with students over how they prefer to learn. Need to figure out what happens next however and what we do with it for 2009/10. But Bradford has dipped a toe into the murky waters of social networking and it's been a success and has also received some positive feedback externally as part of a JISC funded project exploring the use of Web 2.0 tools.

393 members and increasing fast...

Well it appears to be working. Develop Me that is. Students are lurking, signing up and joining in. And the quality of the interactions appears to be much more cerebral than those on FaceBook. I have been most impressed with the sheer volume of traffic on the site - as of today we're topping off at over 600 visitors a day which is fantastic. They are making friends with each other and talking too which is great - and exactly what the site was established for. I got a tingle of excitement when I saw the friendships that were being made - hopefully this will help people feel more confident about arriving on campus in a couple of weeks.

The responses to our expectations questionnaire are also interesting and are showing that students value and need a network like Develop Me! to help them manage that tricky process of defining themselves and developing confidence to approach strangers on arrival.

The real test will come when everyone descends on campus for freshers week. Will the traffic continue to grow? Or will it stop once they can get in touch face-to-face? Only time will tell!