Automatic bibliographies!

It had to happen! You can now get automatic bibliographies generated for you on-line, from information as minimal as a book's ISBN number. Try it!

Two words of caution, though;

1. It does not set up the in-text flags for you, such as Jarvis (2006), and
2. Its default format is MLA (Modern Languages Association) while like most social "science" disciplines, we use APA (American Psychological Association); in order to get that, you have to take out a subscription, but that is only $7.99 (just over £5.00) for a year.

Pass the word!

Study Days are under way

We didn't really need the evidence of the evaluation questionnaires to testify to the reaction to the first of this year's study days; Sue Cowley's presentation in particular went down a bomb. She's coming back for the first year's (or "first years'" if the reference is to students rather than structure...) day on Saturday 29 November, so be prepared!

Study Days are here again!

The first Study Day for Year 2 folks is next Saturday; the link is to the briefing paper. You can download that and the programme for printing, but there is no real need to, since they will both be in your delegate packs. This information is also on BREO.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

It can work out!

We are half-way through the first term, which some people find a daunting stage of the course, where its demands begin to bite. But it is also graduation ceremony time! This year, there were so many people graduating from the programme that the university had to lay on a special ceremony, just for PCE graduates. The photo is testimony that some people actually managed it--we couldn't cover all the centres because there were too many. Sorry about the pink bags, courtesy of the alumni office...

You will be here ere too long!

Coffield diagnoses the ills of the sector

This blog is becoming the Frank Coffield fan club! I can't link to the article because it is not on-line, but if you are a member of the University and Colleges Union (UCU), you will have received a copy of the October magazine; do read "When the solution is the problem..." (pp.9-10) and copy it for your fellow course members.

It's a bit early in the year, but...

Concrete suggestions on how to get stuff written!

Useful article and links on technology in the classroom

Very practical, with plenty of links to resources. It is a little US-centric, though.

New on the parallel blog

Stuff on this blog tends to be directly PCE programme related, so this is simply a reminder of the parallel blog (link in the heading to this post), which includes some new stuff on e-learning and nature/nurture today and is up-dated fairly regularly during term-time.

Best wishes for the new year, both as tutors and participants!

Have you heard about clickers?

FE is often equipped with more sophisticated technology than any other sector. Smart board are now being supplemented by clickers (although they may not be all that useful with small classes); the link is to a useful briefing on their use and effectiveness. It also explains what they are!

Conference papers

You can now download two papers based in part on work with the Programme, and delivered at two international conferences this summer, from the above link. Do feel free to comment via this blog.

All the best for the new academic year, both as tutors/lecturers/teachers and as students!

Useful link for (new) Module 7

For anyone interested in approaches to PCE elsewhere in the world, the US system of "Community Colleges" is well worth looking at. They vary a lot, of course, but many combine vocational and technical education with offering the first two years of a traditional four-year bachelor's degree, thereby contributing a lot to what we would call the "widening participation" agenda. They offer most courses part-time, too. This article from USA Today is a very useful introduction.

Essential Reading

Please go to my other blog (link in heading) to read about and access Coffield F (2008) Just suppose teaching and learning became the first priority... London; Learning and Skills Network.

"Can't Read, Can't Write"

For those of you following up issues from these programmes, there are now some notes here.

Research paper from the Study Days

You may remember that Peter Hadfield and I, in collaboration with a US colleague, were intending to present a paper based on the Study Days at a conference in Canada last month. Unfortunately Peter could not make it, but Renee and I presented, and we have now written it up in an expanded format, linked to from the title of this post (in Acrobat format).

There was far more material in your reports and conversations than we could utilise in this paper, but we thought you might find some of the ideas interesting. Do feel free to comment, of course, via this blog or on BREO.

Threshold Concepts Symposium

The second international symposium on TCs concluded yesterday in Kingston, Ontario. The link from the heading is to some of my initial musings on my other blog. The paper to which you contributed in one way or another was in the very first slot of the conference, so I hope it contributed to setting the tone; the written version will be made available via this site in a week or two.

Are we talking threshold concepts?

OK, this is a little esoteric, perhaps. But you don't have to be familiar with the detail to engage with the principle. Are these sentences critical (if they so be) to the works of literature because they are threshold concepts or for other reasons?

Briefing for Study Day 10 May

The briefing paper for 10 May is now available to download as an Acrobat file; click on the heading to this post to open or download it.

Study Day 10 May

The second Study Day for first-year students will take place on the Polhill Campus on Saturday 10 May: the briefing paper will be available via this site, via BREO and your Centre in the course of the coming week.

This is to remind you to be ready to report on how you have used Threshold Concepts in your teaching since the first Study Day, and to check out on BREO how things have progressed within your Interest Group.

And---having established that Interest Group---we are inviting your suggestions as to how you might best use the Study Day opportunities next year. At your next meeting we shall be inviting you to make suggestions and to plan together for the next two meetings. Give it some thought and share your ideas on BREO so that you are prepared when you meet!

Fancy a smartboard for $50?

Interactive whiteboards ("Smartboard" is a trade name) are popular, but also pricey. Watch this to find out how to make one for $50—notionally £25, but I'm sure more than that in practice. 80% of the functionality for around 1% of the price, the inventor claims. (Laptop and projector not included.)

And go to the link in the header of this post for more of Johnny Lee's inventions, including a steadycam mount for $14 (£7)

Education is often hijacked by suppliers who foist "must-have" electronic gizmos on us (like interactive whiteboard) soaking up resources which could be spent better on much less glamorous items, like books (heard of them?) It's a delight to find the spirit of improvisation is not dead, and that even an under-funded community project can have the latest stuff.

A couple of links for Basic Skills teachers

A correspondent who teaches ESOL in Minnesota strongly recommends this linked paper (you can download it, but it is big).

And as testimony to the site's usefulness, the "related links" feature takes you to The Impact of "Skills for Life" on Adult Basic Skills in England: How Should We Interpret Trends in Participation and Achievement? You can't get that directly from the site, but even the abstract is interesting.

ERIC is back!

I may be late getting this news, but ERIC is back.

Who he? Educational Resources Information Center is the largest largely open-access database of educational research in the world, courtesy of the US Department of Education. A few years ago they pulled the plug on the funding. A couple of sites struggled on, providing access to the database but not adding anything to it, but now it appears to be back in rude health, with over 3200 new resources added in the past month, and new search facilities.

Note that it can't always provide the full-text resources for free, but sometimes it can, and the ERIC "digests" provide superb overviews of selected topics. Bookmark it!

An aside

This may not be about threshold concepts, but if you want a masterclass in how to give an entertaining lecture, as well as some really thought-provoking ideas, then there is no better way to spend twenty minutes.

Question! If you are not teaching in the "arts", what does Ken have to say to your practice?

Did you watch "Lewis" this evening?

As befits the topic, the obvious link tells you nothing!

But did you spot the threshold concept? [Yes, "how sad can you get?" notwithstanding..] The Haydn Gwynne character, maths lecturer, sets a probability problem for her class early in the story. It is about darts, and the odds of player A or player B getting to zero first...

Part of the information she supplies concerns the previous form of both players. I think that is totally irrelevant. The probabilities of the present situation are quite independent of previous success; this is counter-intuitive, hence troublesome knowledge, and possibly a threshold concept.

But is this the case? The probability of success on the basis of previous form is (presumably) a measure of skill, since darts is not a random game...

I have no idea of the answer, of course. I don't even know if there is one.

Study Day Evaluations

Here are the basic evaluations of the first three Study Days, in chart form.*

If;

• you would like the original data to work on, or
  
• you have additional comments to make (existing write-in comments have been noted)

--please comment on this blog.

Thanks

For geeks only:

*It's an Adobe Flash file, which is by far the most compact way of making PowerPoint available on the web. You sacrifice some of the animation and interactivity, but it is small and just one file. You can't export as Flash from Powerpoint, of course. However, just download (completely free--not even any ads) OpenOffice from http://www.openoffice.org/ I say "just" download--it will take a while because OpenOffice is a serious competitor to Microsoft Office, on all fronts. It is fully compatible with MS Office in all but a few esoteric respects (like custom animations), but improves on it in various ways;

• it is FREE
• it can save directly to Acrobat (.pdf) files
• and if appropriate to Flash...

I'm a fan, obviously; but not merely because of the above. For those of you teaching introductory ICT; why are you teaching MS Office? I know it is installed on all the college machines, but there is nothing to stop them installing OpenOffice alongside it. It is FREE, after all. And it is not flaky; it is the non-commercial version of Sun Microsystems office suite, StarOffice, which is the standard package for the German government... And you could legally and legitimately give it to your learners on a CD; saving them at least £120 (you might have to charge them 20p for the disc, of course).

Come to think of it, why Windows? OpenOffice is originally a Linux package...

Are fractions really threshold concepts?

The linked story concerns a maths professor who thinks that fractions can and should be abandoned (along with long division and some other topics) in early maths learning. They might be re-introduced after calculus, he believes.

I have argued that learning basic arithmetic consists of a series of obligatory threshold concepts, but I stopped at division. Fractions usually come next in the traditional school curriculum, and they too are regarded as a threshold concept; this mathematician obviously thinks they are not. Discuss.

A major threshold concept

Over coffee this morning, Peter, Juliet and I were discussing last night's TV; so of course we talked about Horizon on gravity. Peter pointed out that "spacetime" (clearly all one word and sometimes referred to as "the spacetime"), is clearly a threshold concept—and troublesome knowledge—for understanding post-Newtonian physics.

How did the programme do in getting over this critical idea? Do respond!

You can watch the whole programme again for the next six days, or download it and keep it for a month, from the link.

Schadenfreude

Or "hoist with one's own petard"? Dear Chris Woodhead's department at the U of Buckingham has been inspected by Ofsted (hardly worth the effort, with three students...) and got a grade 3!

"Schadenfreude"

(The opposite is "Erfolgstraurigkeit"!)

The Periodic Table as a threshold concept

Having had a discussion last week about the periodic table as a threshold concept in chemistry--which I am sure it must be... Well, that's a lame excuse for publishing this link to an animated version of Tom Lehrer's marvellous setting of "The Elements" (which I will also note on one of my least-visited pages). You will need your speakers on.

Evaluation data for last Saturday

You can now download the basic data from last Saturday's Study Day, in Acrobat format. We hope to undertake more detailed processing shortly. Thanks for the 178 questionnaires returned.

A strange and anomalous result!

You can't please all of the people all of the time? That may indeed be true, but it appears that the two Study Days for Year 2 students have significantly bucked the trend. At the moment we have not yet formally processed the evaluation questionnaires, but the staff review after the event suggested strongly that;

• you found the Study Days useful and stimulating,
• and the theme was helpful--even if you did not stick to it!

Many thanks for your enthusiastic participation and the really positive feel you brought to the proceedings on both days! Do look on BREO for the follow-up material and discussions, and many thanks too to those of you who are posting there.

Clip on Classroom Management

At a recent tutors' meeting, several people mentioned that they had found the following clip to be a useful resource for the discussion of class management;

Health and Safety--a threshold concept?

As we get closer to the second Study Day for second year students, I've posted a short paper offering one answer to the question whether Health and Safety is a threshold concept. I rather surprised myself with the outcome. Given that some Interest Groups have decided to take this topic, I hope you'll find it interesting and it gets you back in the groove for discussing TCs.

Looking forward to seeing you again!

If you can't stand the heat...

In the linked paper I quoted from Meyer and Land (2003) on cooking, and went on to say "Perhaps the fact that I do not find that obvious accounts in some measure for my failings as a cook! Despite the reference to the physical equations about heat transfer, there is no suggestion that it has to be "understood" at that academic level."

Well—look here! "The Invisible Ingredient in Every Kitchen" is a great bite-size exposition from the New York Times of a couple of days ago.

It worked for me, in terms of understanding what is going on (better in fact than Heston Blumenthal's (2006) In search of perfection London; Bloomsbury ; always reference correctly even when the source is downright silly, as this one is!)

Since somehow I am on to that... Implicit in Blumenthal's title is a (tongue-in-cheek) assumptions that there is a definitive version of several classic recipes. But the point of all of them is that they are themes around which there are countless variations; that is what makes them classics (we're not necessarily talking haute cuisine here; he has chapters on roast chicken, fish and chips, bangers and mash...).

Question, folks! How do Blumenthal's recipes relate to learning how to cook?

Several years ago, we had a really good student who taught cooking. (As I write that I become aware that he taught chefs. It's not the same thing. But he did not teach "catering", because he was really keen on the hands-on skills of cooking--but on a large scale.) However! I vividly remember him telling me that his principal problem was getting his trainees to eat what they cooked. Often they did not want to taste it! What was the threshold concept for his students?

Is there a threshold concept here?

You don't have to agree with a case (I'm taking no position on the substance of the argument) for it to change how you see something. This is from an email from www.ted.com (I have no idea who Ken Blackman is and it doesn't matter);

Ken Blackman on Andrew Mwenda's Let's take a new look at African aid (17 minutes video): The jewel of this talk for me is Mwenda's persuasive case that the aid industry "has distorted the structure of incentives facing governments in Africa." His re-framing of the effects of aid assistance in terms of governmental "self-interest" sheds a completely new light on the subject for me.

Discuss with reference to the criteria... Can it be a threshold concept if you are not persuaded? (Don't ask me! I don't know—this is new stuff, remember?/

Threshold Concepts in EFL

A correspondent (not someone on the course, but a teacher of English in South Korea) wrote;

'I think I've identified a threshold concept that my students aren't getting.

Sometimes I seem to be telling the students they need to talk and not worry about grammar and pronunciation while at other times I correct their grammar and pronunciation. This is very confusing.

A book like "The Color Purple" is a perfect example of this apparent conflict in the language arts, and I think my high school English teacher was trying to make the point with James Joyce.

It's one of those concepts that I had forgotten I had learned. I'm still not exactly sure how to state it.

"Communication is more important than following all the little rules". Maybe?

I replied;

Re. your post above; I'm reminded of George Herbert's "The Elixir", one verse of which goes;

A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleases, through it pass,
And then the heaven espy.

At this level it is indeed all too easy to get distracted by the minutiae of language, rather than be aware what one can do with it. And indeed, this is a problem for a classroom-based learner, because in reality unless you are in a country/community which routinely uses the target language, all you can do with it is to seek approval for getting your exercises right. The question of whether what you say in the target language has the desired social or practical effect does not really arise, except perhaps in unscripted role-play.

Unfortunately we do not know very well how to assess that practical competence apart from accuracy and adherence to rules, so the setting may well conspire against real learning. It is interesting to see how Michel Thomas' approach (about which I do not know very much--and remember I am not an expert in this field) tries to get people out of the frame of mind of "I have to learn this" (http://www.michelthomas.com/)

Thoughts?

[I'll post this to the threshold concepts blog and see whether there are any takers...]

Greetings for the New Year!

Welcome to 2008! We shall be having the second study day for second-years shortly, and in preparation I shall be posting some thoughts and responses to questions about threshold concepts etc. which have cropped up over the break.

Please encourage your colleagues to read, and to comment. And if your discussions on the VLE are not up to date, I hope you have made a new year resolution to sort them out.

James