Skip to content

https://www.ajiunit.com/investigation/degrees-of-abuse/

An important report into a problem that should have been sorted years ago, no excuse, no toleration.

I have now given up my last educational development role and while staying connected with that area from a distance am concentrating on my retirement (gardening, family history etc) and my last part-time role - supervising Master's dissertations.

I am keen to further develop my skills and approach to supervision. Postgraduate taught (PGT) courses are an interesting area in Higher Education. While seen as a cash cow (although increasingly not bringing in enough cash) they are an important stage in some people's academic development. Unfortunately, the learning needs of PGT students are often ignored, including supervision.

My blog will now tend to focus on those areas, with less about educational development as times go on, although the two are clearly related.

1

https://towardsdatascience.com/towards-the-end-of-deep-learning-and-the-beginning-of-agi-d214d222c4cb

Interesting article on developments in neurology of learning, all pathways connected to movement!

https://www.citylit.ac.uk/courses/environment-and-ecology-in-contemporary-fiction/hlt230-2021

As the ongoing climate crisis deepens and the impact of human activity on the natural world becomes increasingly stark, environment and ecology have become central concerns in contemporary culture and society. This course explores how recent fiction has responded to these concerns, focusing on three novels from the last decade. We will discuss themes including contemporary nature writing, environmental justice, and the future impact of climate change. Authors include Melissa Harrison, Jesmyn Ward and James Bradley.

via Early Career Academics' Reflections

SEDA is publishing an open access book online, with a chapter released on its website every fortnight.  Each time a chapter is released it will be accompanied by a blog post published on SEDA WordPress. The book is called Early Career Academics’ Reflections on Learning to Teach in Central Europe, edited by Gabriela Pleschová and Agnes Simon. This book contains case studies by participants of a new educational development programme who redesigned their course sessions to apply student-centred approaches, using innovative teaching methods and stimulate good learning.

The 2019 lecture was given by Tim Berners-Lee in the week of the launch of the Contract for the web. The lecture was inspiring and positive despite the challenges the internet faces today and anyone who uses the internet seriously should watch it!

Shameful report showing the extent of the problem, and failure of universities failing to address thousands of racist incidents

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/23/universities-failing-to-address-thousands-of-racist-incidents?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_WordPress

The article below is a summary of a small sample of research into note taking,of which there is now quite a lot.

The search for the ideal way to take notes is an illusion, unless/until we regulate learning from the beginning of education, everyone will develop their own way of doing learning, including note taking. Successful note taking its therefore a matter of individual and subject matter factors.

There are however two criteria that I think are helpful in guiding people.

1 is the question of the purpose of the learning, and the use you will make of the information. Notes for an exam are different from other sorts of notes. As with other aspects of HE students may find it useful to be shown successful note taking in different contexts, academic and vocational, and how the different purposes leads to different approaches. How will you need to recall this, is the crucial and practical question.

2 the crucial aspect of that is the question of importance, and the time you are willing to invest. The principal is that the more psychological work the better the learning. One aspect of this is putting it into your own words, as mentioned in the article below, but only if that meets the first criteria.

http://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2019/7/25-1

https://educationblog.microsoft.com/en-us/2019/06/30-summer-updates-for-onenote-and-class-notebooks/

I think UK universities are missing a lot by not benefiting from Microsoft tools they are paying for.