The heading link is to Frank Coffield's latest dispassionate analysis of Ofsted's "Common Inspection Framework". Thanks to Peter for finding it. Enjoy!
The first Study Day of the year took place last Saturday. Thanks to everyone who put in so much effort to ensure that everyone could take something useful away.
The Interest Groups spent the morning concluding the work started on Threshold Concepts at the second Study Day of last year, and illustrated some of their work through posters which could be viewed and discussed over the lunch break. There were some fascinating visualisations: click on the picture below to go to the web album.
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Looking at the posters, which of the groups do you think really got the idea? And how can you tell?Feel free to post your reactions and comments, via BREO if you prefer. This is not intended to pass judgement on any group or individual--the task is not a summative assessment. But it may help me and anyone else who is interested to evaluate whether there are any links perhaps between disciplines or areas of practice, and the usefulness or nature of TCs. For example the Special Needs group in photo 9 draws attention to the fact that the "irreversibility" criterion just does not work for people with learning disabilities (pretty well by definition). One of their major problems is that learning does not "stick". But in photo 25, another Special Needs group takes a very specific bit of learning (the concept of "knife") and shows how it leads on into other areas...
If academic writing is a new game for you, how about making use of this facility? :-)
Congratulations to all of you who graduated yesterday, whether you were at the ceremonies in person or not. Very well done, and we hope your learning continues to bear fruit even after the course.
The Programme put on a terrific showing at the Bedford Graduation Ceremonies. There were far too many of you for us to get a shot of you all, but after some lobbying this was the first year that your tutors from the college centres as well as the university have joined the platform party, so I thought you might like to see some of us in our academic finery.
The programmes and briefing papers for both the Year 1 (28 November) and Year 2 (14 November) Study Days can now be downloaded from http://www.bedspce.org.uk/downloads/index.htm#Programmes as well as from BREO.
Looking forward to seeing you there.
Arising from the preceding post on referencing, some people have asked me for succinct guidance on avoiding plagiarism in general. The link from the heading is to a 7-minute video by Jude Carroll of Oxford Brookes University, probably the foremost expert on detecting and avoiding plagiarism anywhere, who offers practical guidance on making sure that your work is original. (The full transcript of the video is further down the same page.)
Here is a slidecast of the presentation on Harvard referencing. Note it needs some amendment--see if you can sport the deliberate mistakes!
The link is to a blog from a student on a similar course to yours (but, from external evidence, not this one).
Peter and I were discussing over coffee this morning the article by Peter Wilby in the Education Guardian yesterday on David Hargreaves, and his radical ideas for the education system. (Who? Where?)
We thought this was the kind of material which should be discussed on every teacher education programme, including of course PCE programmes, and especially ours. I said I would post a link on this blog, but then it occurred to me that it would make more sense to include a permanent link in the blog side-bar, so you could easily access the Education Guardian (and the Times Ed, and the Timer Higher, and the Independent Education...) from one place. No excuse!
So look to the left of this post and you will find links to those places. We may add more, particularly if you suggest them. And I may (no promises) post here about particularly useful news resources as they come up.
The important thing is that you need only to bookmark this page—the one you are currently looking at—to have direct links to all this material. Go on! You know it makes sense!
(Oh, and of course you can easily find the Hargreaves article linked from the bottom right of the Guardian page.)
AND! Special bonus back-to-school offer, never to be repeated! (etc.) The learningandteaching.info sites have been revised and up-dated for the start of the new academic year.
Frank Coffield has done it again. All you ever wanted to know about learning and teaching but were too cool to ask is a counterpart to Just Suppose Teaching and Learning became the First Priority. As before it is available as a free download from Learning and Skills Network Publications. While the former pamphlet was addressed to college managers, this one is aimed at actual students, and based on conversations with a range of them on courses in further education.
It's arrived too late to go into the essential reading section of our course handbook, but we shall plug it hard.
From last week's Times Educational Supplement, in case you missed it, Frank Coffield is following up on "Just Suppose Teaching and Learning became the First Priority" (2008), which is required reading for the course.
Incidentally, if this blog is correct, it looks as if he has won one victory; the DfES (remember when we had a ministry with "education" in the title?) appears to have withdrawn its booklet on learning styles.
The latest versions of the working papers, the 2009-2010 handbook and mentor briefing materials are now available at the link above. Please let us know of any hitches you encounter with them.
Penn (of and Teller) makes a great point while illustrating the threshold topics label.
Fascinating Horizon programme on BBC2 last night, in which Marcus du Sautoy tried to introduce Alan Davies to the joys of maths (while interestingly demonstrating that for a professor of maths, he's not that good at mental arithmetic). Of course, threshold concepts or topics were never mentioned, but that was what this was about, as it opened up a host of new perspectives on the world for Davies. The heading link is to the BBC iPlayer; watch it now before it disappears!
Thanks to everyone who attended and contributed to the second Year 1 Study Day last Saturday. Sharing the campus with another event made it rather crowded, so thanks for your forebearance, and especial appreciation to the catering staff for their sterling efforts to make sure we were all fed and watered.
The plenary session on this occasion was home-grown. It does not look as though we shall be producing the video as we had expected; the strange arrangement of the twin lecture theatres was not conducive to keeping Peter and myself in view! However, here is the presentation, annotated for the benefit of those who weren't there to hear it.
Click on the heading to download the briefing paper for the second-year Study Day on Saturday (first years on 28 March). We're looking forward to seeing you; it promises to be every bit as interesting as the first one, although rather different in style.
If you have not come across this on-line journal, I can commend it; as well as being well-rooted in experience, the papers tend to be reflective while retaining a serious academic perspective. A useful model for some of your own work. Incidentally, the current issue is focused on India; it is also interesting to read the distinctive voice of some contributors and to reflect on their different starting points.
Oh! And Happy New Year! I'm sure you're desperate to get back to work and the course after all the irritating distraction of the past couple of weeks...
