Moodle "Official" Music Video

A class project, would you believe, from Taylor University

Do we need teachers in Higher Education?

Interesting article by Paul Ramsden on the THE website about how "Producing graduates who are critical thinkers requires teachers who can bring scholarship and leadership to the academy."

As with many others, I have long thought that teaching is unbelievably undervalued and often poorly done in higher education. He argues in that although Student Satisfaction is now all the rage in the UK, universities are often barking up the wrong tree. How much marketing literature shows happy, smiling students studying on the beach and then walking off into the sunset with a good degree and a dream graduate job? The pressure to produce more happy students with a 2:1 misses what I think is fundamental about higher education. We could make students happy by handing out free beer at lectures, putting soft porn on the VLE and ensuring all students get a 2:1 but I'm not sure that would fulfill the mission of a University. We can often get dangerously close to thinking of students as customers to be serviced. However, when I go to a restaurant I'm not asked to think about the meal I'm about to eat. I don't have to go away and research the ingredients. I don't have to read about the great chefs who have cooked this meal in the past. I don't have to explore the cultural significance of the meal. I don't have to understand how to cook the meal and I'm not then asked to cook it myself, perhaps with my own individual take on the recipe. In a restaurant you are a customer, as student you are not a customer, more a partner in you own (and ideally the university's) development. As Ramsden argues, “Teaching in higher education should never fool students into thinking there is an easy path to success. Rather, it should make the hardest road enjoyable to follow by communicating complex ideas clearly and succinctly” and also that "Accomplished teaching is the single most important method of producing graduates who can reason and act for themselves, and can apply theory to practical problems - precisely the skills that any employer wants to see."

He also discusses the emphasis that is put on research to the detriment of teaching and argues that when interviewing successful researchers about their teaching he discovered that, “the researchers who were good at teaching - who went about it by focusing on students and their learning (rather than their own teaching performance or transmitting information) - were not those who necessarily produced the most research. They were the ones who focused on the underlying structure of their investigations, on the broad conceptual framework of their subject, rather than isolated individual problems within it - the ones who were scholars in their discipline.”

He concludes that, "The rationale for university teaching is not satisfying students, distributing information to them nor changing them, as some condescendingly say. Rather, it is enabling students to change for themselves." And that way to do that is through excellent teaching.

The learner experience of transition - ELESIG Summer Symposium

Last week saw the 3rd ELESIG Summer symposium; this year in Leeds. ELESIG is “an international community of researchers and practitioners from higher and further education who are involved in investigations of learners' experiences and uses of technology in learning”. The website can be found at http://elesig.ning.com/

The first day was a mix of past projects sharing their stories and new hopefuls pitching their ideas

Terri Rees from Plymouth in her work with international students experience of e-learning talked about the how learners often have different levels of participation on and off line. Some individuals contribute less online than they do in class and some the other way round. She talked about the importance of rapport building before learners go online in order to build community.

Alice Lau from Glamorgan also talked about the experience of international students, with the iLExSIG project. Her presentation had the added bonus of having two students with her to talk about their experiences. You can find out more about iLExSIG on the ELESIG site.

The second day combined with the Aim Higher conference, with a keynote on Transition by Bill Johnston from Strathclyde. Among many areas he talked about were -

The need to look at transition in broad societal terms

The idea of Transition in and out of higher education. Do the careers service have an input?
Transition is about any aspect of the first year when individuals have to make a change – learning, social …....... many areas

Students often start excited but then dip in motivation and performance. “I only need 40% to pass that's me, I can get by.”There is a need to look more at what success is. Learning goals or assessment goals? Marks of real learning? Do we want students to learn or pass? Just passing will end up with everyone unhappy eventually.

Don't look at why students drop out, look at why they stay. What was it that made them stay, particularly if they were thinking about dropping out. Sounds like a case for Appreciative Inquiry to me :-)

He also asked what is success in higher education and illustrated his thoughts with a few quotes -

“to prepare students for lifelong, self-regulated, co-operative and work-based learning” Jan D Vermunt 2007

“used to think that academia, like the Vatican and prostitution, was great survivor of social upheaval”

“information literacy is the adoption of appropriate information behavior to identify, though whatever channel or medium, information well fitted to information needs leading to wise and ethical use of information in society” – Johnston & Weber

Hmmm…. Ethical? BP and RBS managers are graduates!

But how to embed Education for Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship (ESDGC)into the curriculum? He argued for an Information Literate University, which has information literate staff, curriculum, students and graduates. It’s much more than creating knowledge workers for an information society

This was followed by a very interesting workshop by Kyriaki Anagnostopoulou and Deeba Parmer from Middlesex University, where we looked at what could be done to help some fictitious students make the transition to university life.

One of things that Middlesex has done is to show the real university, warts and all, in bridging materials before students come. Obviously marketing didn't like this. “Where's the sun and happy students?” they cried. “This will put them off” To which the response was that if they are put when they arrive and leave, the university is no better off but if some have a more realistic view of university life, the transition process may be smoother and some who may have dropped out will stay.

Old videos never die...

Just back from Gregynog 2010 - several days of library, IT and e-learning presentations. There were and number of good sessions and lots of interesting people. I don't know why but on Thursday my mind drifted to an old Lunch and Learn session ...............

Is Powerpoint evil? from Chris on Vimeo.

Sustainable e-learning?

Last week I was at the 8th International JTEFS/BBCC Conference "Sustainable Development. Culture. Education at UNESCO in Paris. The picture is the view fron the UNESC canteen :-) I presented in the Education for Sustainable Development and E-learning strand, which looked at what are the challenges of e-learning/blended learning for higher education institutions? E-learning as the issue of non-formal education and E-learning and communication. My presentation was entitled "The Digital Natives Meme. Why context is more important than technology with the following abstract -

"Rising student numbers, greater funding pressure and an increasing consumerisation of education pose dilemmas for educators. Additionally, we are told that technology is going to transform education; that a new breed of young people, who have not known a world without pervasive electronic technology, are entering education; that this will lead to a paradigm shift and those unable or unwilling to make the change will be swept away. However, recent research shows this may not be the case. Using examples from an ongoing study of university students' experiences of using technology, this paper argues that a debate that is framed by thoughts of an army of homogeneous digital natives will produce technology 'solutions' that are unsustainable. It will go on to argue that a more context based approach towards the use of technology is needed in order to provide sustainable solutions to the issues facing educators in the 21st century."

The Digital Natives Meme. Why context is more important than technology

View more presentations from Chris Hall.

Overall the conference was pretty good with a number of excellent presentations from Dr Peter Purg(Slovenia),Dr Richard R. Jurin(USA) and Dr Mark Mifsud (Malta)

A final thougt

A tag cloud from my posts on Poznan.

although arrived beer class course debate different e-learning election english events flat guard helped interesting jestem language later learning lecture lots ma maybe nice number online people phone planning poland polish poznan presentation quite security senate session students sunshine sure teaching think thought today traditional university used wall week work

created at TagCrowd.com

And so the end is near....

So, today is my last day at AMU. I can't believe that it has gone so quickly and I could quite happily stay longer. Just starting to get into the swing of things and now it's time to go home :-( It has been a great experience and I've been made to feel part of the team by Prof Włodzimierz Sobkowiak, Dr Przemyslaw Kaszubski and Dr Michał Remiszewski as well as the other staff at IFA.

I'm currently looking at some work being done by Dr Przemyslaw Kaszubski that 'provides a platform for annotated concordancing activities for EAP learners and teachers' http://ifa.amu.edu.pl/~ifaconc/ We're meeting up later, my final session, to go through the project in more detail.



However, my Erasmus trip is not completely over. On Wednesday we had some technical problems with the Second Life session so we have rescheduled it for a couple of weeks time. I wonder if you can get expenses for going into SL?

Is teaching online different?

So, my final session with the MA ICT in EFL class and my final presentation of my stay here. They are a very nice group of students and it has been a pleasure to work with them, albeit briefly. This session was about what similarities and differences there may be between teaching online and teaching in a more traditional classroom situation.

MA ICT for EFL - Is teaching online different

View more presentations from Chris Hall.

It was an interesting session but I'm not sure if I 'performed' as well as the week before. I felt I got pretty waffley in the second half of the lecture when talking about blogging. We some very interesting discussions though, particularly towards the end when there was quite a debate on what constitutes a 'real' conversation. One student proposed that she liked the idea of using blogs for teaching and learning writing in English, as the 'conversation' between the blogger and those making comments would be more 'real' than in a rather more 'artificial' traditional writing exercise. This sparked another student who felt that any such 'conversation' could not be real in the way that a face-to-face conversation is. The debate flowed back and forth and interestingly mirrored some of the conversations the IFA staff had had about what it means to meet. All very interesting stuff that I left Prof Sobkowiak to deal with later in the course :-)

Research, development and IPR?

Today, as well as planning for tomorrow's lecture for the MA ICT in EFL class, I had a chance to look at some very interesting work being done by Dr. Michał Remiszewski Assistant professor in the Department of Computer Assisted English Linguistics here at IFA, AMU.

He's working on a powerful assessment tool, which has great potential for teaching as well as providing a good deal of research material. I'll be very interested to see where this goes. It also led to an interesting debate on universities attitudes to Intellectual Property Rights. A recurring theme around the world I think.

More than just lecture notes........

After fighting my way past the librarians (actually I've discovered it's just one who appears to be evil and all the others are actually very nice and helpful. Maybe all libraries have to employ at least one Evil Librarian? Is it a job title? Is it a vocation? Can you do Evil Librarianship Studies?) I put the finishing touches to today's lecture. I was asked to talk about how you can use a VLE for more than just lecture notes and also if I could use some real examples that I had taught with.

I talked about the TRIO Critical Thinking module I taught a while back and none of it was particularly new - thinking about the context(s) the learning will take place in, starting with the assessment and working back to the activities, socialising the students into the learning environment, getting the students to do the work, learning being a social activity and obviously the technology coming last in the process.

More than just lecture notes........

View more presentations from Chris Hall.

Once again after the lecture there was a really lively discussion that continued for around 45 minutes and covered the nature of learning, the role and future of teaching, what we mean by communication and the assumptions we make when talking about various forms of communication, virtual worlds and student perceptions of learning. It even got a little heated at one point, which is always the sign of a real debate :-) As with all good discussions it continued in the pub over a beer.

Sunshine, opera, beer and of course some work

Poland is almost back to normal now as the official period of mourning is over, although many of the TV channels seem to be still devoted to it. The weekend was quite strange, as I thought Sunday, the day of the funeral, would be very quiet indeed. In fact the old town was full of Poles eating, drinking and enjoying the sunshine. Maybe they had all got a bit stir crazy with the wall to wall TV coverage? The weekend was very pleasant with a bit of sightseeing, an excellent version of Don Giovani, lots of good Polish food with far too much fine Polish beer with friends.

Back to work and today is a preparation day for me and I've been spending most of it in the Library (What is it with (some) librarins? All some of them need is a uniform, maybe a hat!) working on this weeks lectures and presentations. Topics include: How do online teaching and traditional teaching differ, a case study of a level one online module and Blackboard vs Moodle - I think we all know the answer to that one. Well, most of us do anyway :-)

So only a week left :-( Although given what's going on with the ash........

Jestem jaka jestem i jestem nauczycielem.

It's Thursday so I must be teaching. The class was on IT for English language teaching, which is an elective for second year MA students. They were in the middle of doing some history of CALL but we jumped ahead to later in the course and I looked and using wikis for collaborative language learning. The standard lectures are 90 mins, so you have an opportunity to get students more invloved than in a 50 min lecture. This suits me fine as once a TEFL teacher always a TEFL teacher and the first part of the lecture involved lots of bits if paper and the students doing all the work. I'm not sure they are used to that sort of thing in a normal lecture and suspect they wondered what this mad Englishman up to. I think it went down well or perhaps they were just being very polite.

Although the University uses a VLE I chose not to use it for the class as most of the students are or will be teaching in primary and secondary schools, very few of which have a VLE. I thought it made sense for them to look at something they could try for themselves and with their classes. I used PB Works but could equally have used wikispaces as well.

I used the wiki for the presentation as well as showing a small number of example uses.
http://inveniotech.pbworks.com/

During the last half hour we had an interesting debate on the whys, wherefores and practicalities of group activities, with a number of contributions from the three members of academic staff who also came to the lecture.

After a planning meeting for next week that followed the lecture, I got back to my flat in time to get something to eat and then watch the election debate on BBC World. Interesting stuff but not nearly as interesting as the Presidential election in Poland is going to be. The Speaker of the Parliament was the favourite to win the next election against the former President who has just died , which has now been brought forward. However, as Speaker, he is now the acting President and has to arrange the election. It is also likely that he will be now running against the former Prime Minister, who happens to be the dead President's twin brother! Interesting times in Poland.

Poznan remembers

Lectures were cancelled today as the public universities in Poznan joined together in mourning at the Senate. The Senate building is very impressive, as was the turnout which was standing room only. The proceedings included music from an excellent choir and organist as well as a number of speeches which, although I picked up some of, were quite hard for me to follow. The Senate session was followed by an open air public mass, which was notable for the wide age range there including young children and lots of students. Would that happen in the UK?

Tomorrow I'm lecturing on one of the MA courses on the subject of using wikis for collaborative language learning. Some midnight oil will be burnt preparing that methinks.

e-learning by the people, for the people and of the people

First presentation today on some of our experiences of e-learning at Swansea and some of the lessons we have learnt. There was some interesting debate and the bottle of Welsh whisky I presented went down well. Wednesday will be a strange day as much of it will be taken up with a memorial service in the Senate, Thursday I'll be teaching on one of the MA courses on using technology in language teaching and Friday will be a planning day for the training sessions we'll be running next week. At the weekends a whole different set of students arrive at the university to take their classes, so teaching is really a 7 day a week job. I wonder what the UCU would make of that?

e-learning by the people, for the people and of the people

View more presentations from chrismh99.

Events dear boy, events!

I'm not sure how my first week will pan out as, to quote Harold Macmillan, my trip has been affected by events. I'm giving a presentation tomorrow - e-learning for the people, by the people and of the people - so I'll be working on that today. Everything is quite subdued but people here in Poznan are getting back to work, so there aren't scenes like those in Warsaw. They may all be inside watching the wall to wall coverage on almost every channel on television - except one that seems to be showing non-stop vollyball.

As with Riga last year, I have arrived to wonderful spring sunshine. I hope it lasts but I fear I may have brought some Swansea rain with me.

Greetings from Poznan.........

What is it with me arriving for an Erasmus visit? My trip to Riga last May stated interestingly and, after a good journey to Poznan via Berlin, so did this one. I arrived at the office of the flat I had booked (cheaper than a hotel and all of those were booked anyway) to find it closed. No problem I thought, I'll just call them. I tried to use my shinny new Android phone only to discover that those nice people at Virgin had decided to block it from roaming, so all I could do was ring for an ambulance. Although a little concerned, I didn't think there was any need for that just yet. A little later, someone else with a suitcase in tow arrived along with the building security guard. The fellow traveller, who spoke no Polish, was looking for a completely different set of flats but the security guard, who spoke no English and had that wonderful demeanor of Polish officialdom, insisted that this was where he should be. My basic Polish helped resolve the situation and I was just about to ask if I could borrow the other flat hunter’s phone, when he and the security guard promptly left! Ch****a! No chance of getting a new SIM card as all the shops were shut, for obvious reasons. Just as I was beginning to think about ringing that ambulance the fellow flat hunter returned, thanked me for helping him and let me borrow his phone :-) 10 minutes later I was in my flat - phew!