Democratising innovation Caught an interesting programme on the BBC World Service yesterday, an interview with Professor Eric von Hippel on "Global Business". He argues that people who use the products know more than producers, it's wrong to give people what we think they want rather than what they say they actually want ... He uses the Open Source computer software as an example of user-centred innovation where users who contribute benefit from use rather than in a monetary way. His book "Democratising Innovation" is downloadable through a Creative Commons License from here.  ¶ 3:04 pm 0 Comments

  Risky fieldwork A big headline in the THES drew attention to the risks of fieldwork and highlighted the findings of a new report on the "Risk to Well-Being of Researchers in Qualitative Research", to download go to this site.

The report recommends:

1. Postgraduate research methods courses should include research safety in their curricula.

2. The Economic and Social Research Council should consider whether provision of safety training in postgraduate research methods curricula should be a factor in determining whether those methods receive ESRC recognition.

3. University in-service training courses for PhD supervisors and principal investigators should cover researcher safety.

4. All university departments should be subject to periodic health and safety audits, which would include examination of provision for researcher safety.

5. All funders should require principal investigators to comply with the Social Research Association (or similar) guidelines.

6. All funders should formally invite referees to comment on researcher safety issues, where salient, as part of their assessments of grant applicants' research methods.

7. All university ethics committees should accept formal responsibility for oversight of provision for postgraduate student safety, with safety being addressed in the context of a specific question on the application form and of the guidance on form completion.

Take a look at Loughborough's Guidance for Investigators, available here.  ¶ 2:23 pm 0 Comments

  Work placement experiences Ex-Loughborough students tell us what they think of their work placement experiences on the new web site they have set up RateMyPlacement.co.uk. Complements the work we're doing on the work placement experience ... perhaps. Myself and a colleague have written a paper for ISL 2007 on this work.

There's also something in the archives.  ¶ 1:50 pm 1 Comments

  The skills debate - skills & happiness Following on from the comments of Joel Silver at ISATT 2007, as outlined below, there has been a fair bit in the press about the Government focus on skills and perhaps a change in opinion. For example Maria Misra, in the THES 3/8/07 "There's lots of life beyond skills", tells us that "our leaders now claim to recognise that we cannot live by business skills and high-tech achievements alone. Happiness, it turns out, is not the consequence of earning more, of climbing international league tables or of deploying our skill sets in some great global economic machine, but of creativity, self fulfillment and the sense of living for a purpose." She cites economist Richard Layard as the influential thinker in this case. His work is also cited in a Guardian article in the context of an article about possible Tory policy and a newly published report on "Happiness, Economics and Public Policy" which critiques Government attempts to promote happiness through policy.

On a totally different tack Jim Hillage from the Institute for Employment Studies tells us that " Universities should be focusing on building relationships with different, often smaller, workplaces, and that will require more understanding of this group, along with greater flexibility about meeting their individual needs." (THES 3/8/07 Everyone has the right to better skills).  ¶ 11:43 am 0 Comments

  ISATT 2007 "Totems & Taboos"
The International Study Association on Teachers and Teaching held its biennial conference at Brock University, St Catherines, Ontario, Canada in July this year. ISATT 2007 had the theme "Totems and Taboos: Risk & Relevance in Research" and brought together just under 200 researchers and practitioners from a great variety of countries (Canada, the UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Mexico, Portugal, Norway, Finland …). The conference organisers provided us with a full programme of papers, keynotes and social activities with enough space to indulge in those discussions provoked by so many intellectual exchanges.

There were some interesting keynotes, not least Joel Spring from City University, New York who challenged the way lifelong learning has been debased, from development as a person to skills acquisition at the behest of the economy. He argued that the knowledge economy is based on the principle of consumerism and education on delivering the global consumer, aims which lead to great dissatisfaction and uncertainty as we are encouraged to constantly strive for "more" and "better" rather than enough for our needs. If you want to know more check out his latest book "Pedagogies of Globalization".

Keith Trigwell, who has returned to the University of Sydney after a stint at Oxford University, told us about his phenomenographic research looking at approaches to teaching of lecturers and the impact this has on student learning, work that has been published over a number of years with colleagues such as Mike Prosser, Paul Ramsden and Elaine Martin. He also discussed the hierarchy of research he and Paul Ashwin developed, referencing work done by Carolin Kreber, currently at Edinburgh University.

There were other papers of interest dealing with the development of academic identity, reflective studies on becoming an academic, supervisor training, teaching graduate students to teach, technology use and a lunchtime session on how to get published in the society's journal Teachers and Teaching - Theory and Practice.

I presented a paper about the aims of the CETL initiative in the UK and the pedagogic research work being conducted within the engCETL. She outlined the issues she has to deal with as a pedagogic researcher working within a different disciplinary culture and the activities she has undertaken in order to encourage colleagues within the engCETL and associated academic departments to think about pedagogic research and identify good teaching and learning practice in order to enhance student learning.

The next conference, in 2009, will be held in Rovainiemi in Finnish Lapland, hope to see you there! Take a look at this info:Travel advisor Finavia, The Independent article on Lapland

Some relevant references:

Ashwin, P., & Trigwell, K. (2004). Investigating Staff and Educational Development. In P. Khan & D. Baume (Eds.), Enhancing Staff and Educational Development. London: Kogan Page.

Kreber, C. (2002). Controversy and Consensus on the Scholarship of Teaching. Studies in Higher Education, 27(2), 151 - 167.

Kreber, C. (2003). The scholarship of teaching: A comparison of conceptions held by experts and regular academic staff. Higher Education, 46(1), 93-121.

Prosser, M., & Trigwell, K. (1999). Understanding Learning and Teaching: The Experience in Higher Education. Buckingham: SRHE and Open University Press.

Prosser, M., Ramsden, P., Trigwell, K., & Martin, E. (2003). Dissonance in Experience of Teaching and its Relation to the Quality of Student Learning. Studies in Higher Education, 28(1), 37-48.

Prosser, M., & Trigwell, K. (2005). Confirmatory factor analysis of the Approaches to Teaching Inventory. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 76(2), 405-419.

Spring, J. (2006). Pedagogies of Globalization: The Rise of the Educational Security State (Sociocultural, Political, and Historical Studies in Education) (Sociocultural, Political, and Historical Studies in Education): Lawrence Erlbaum.

Trigwell, K., Prosser, M., & Ginns, P. (2005). Phenomenographic pedagogy and a revised Approaches to teaching inventory. Higher Education Research & Development, 24(4), 349-360.

  ¶ 2:35 pm 0 Comments

  Thinking about podcasting? Take a look at the IMPALA project at Leicester University and this article by Steve Draper and Joe Maguire "Exploring Podcasting as Part of Campus-Based Teaching".  ¶ 1:55 pm 0 Comments