Avoiding plagiarism

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.)

Basic Author Date (Harvard) Referencing

Here is a slidecast of the presentation on Harvard referencing. Note it needs some amendment--see if you can sport the deliberate mistakes!

Basic Author Date (Harvard) Referencing

View more presentations from James Atherton.

Up-date; I've fixed the more obvious ones but there may well be others!

A parallel reflection

The link is to a blog from a student on a similar course to yours (but, from external evidence, not this one).

• Is his (inferred gender) experience similar to yours?
• Would you have written it up in the same way?
• What can you learn about the process of reflection (and of action on reflection) from his contribution?

Do get back to him using the comment facility on his blog. And do try the same thing yourself. If you want a plug on this blog (last readership count was ????) email me. (Yes I know there are other ways--why is there not a PCE FaceBook/MySpace/Ning/SecondLife presence? Because some among you are the experts, not me. But use this hub as a way of setting things up...)

•  And does it make any difference to his experience of the course and the literature that he is an engineer? (Absolutely no disrespect to engineers; but does the discipline from which you approach the task of teaching affect your perspective on it and the talk surrounding it?)
  

Keep up to date!

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.

Coffield's latest

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.

"Professor Coffield writes in a personal capacity"

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.

Latest working papers now up-loaded

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.