Year 2--first Study Day

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.

Study day 141109

On the evidence of the posters, and also of participants' own views as reflected in the evaluations, there was quite a lot of variation in how people approached, understood and valued TCs. (Based on 105 returns only, 26.7% rated the work done on them "Very Useful", 55.2% "Quite Useful", and 15.2% "Not Useful at all".)

As you know, TCs are themselves TCs, so we didn't expect everyone would get them at once (or even after a while). But assessing TCs is an interesting task in its own right, so;

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...

Neither is right or wrong, better or worse, but both are ways into the discussion, and everyone has contributed to that. Long may it continue.

I'll post more from processing the evaluations and from Peter's presentation as soon as I can.