Work placements - effects and awards. Lots of stuff around at the moment about work placements. ASET have crunched some stats re the effect of a placement on degree results, take a look at their short report, more to follow apparently. Also the National Council for Work Placements are running a competition awarding companies for the best work experience.  ¶ 5:16 pm 0 Comments

  Working in an open plan office There's been a bit of discussion in the Times Higher recently about flexible working and open plan offices (see "Say goodbye to the office" 28th Sept p. 48 and a letter "Open plan needs good planning" 5th October p.15). You can see from the title of the letter which way this is leaning with comments such as "nothing prepared me for the open-plan offices I have encountered in universities: as many desks as possible arranged in a large room, with apparently no thought given to team dynamics, noise management, privacy, heating and ventilation, storage space, meeting space or even cleaning." (5/10) Also "It is impossible to think, write, exchange ideas here. Thinking and writing has to be done at home or while travelling to/from work. It is noisy and any discussion interrupts other staff." (28/9)

There was also a lot of discussion about working in open plan offices on one of the lists I subscribe to, the following article was mentioned (our institution subscribes to Ergonomics journal) :

Office noise and employee concentration: Identifying causes of disruption and potential improvements
SP Banbury A1 and DC Berry A2
A1 School of Psychology Cardiff University UKA2 Department of Psychology Reading University UK
Ergonomics, Volume 48, Number 1 / January 2005, p. 25 - 37

Abstract:
A field study assessed subjective reports of distraction from various office sounds among 88 employees at two sites. In addition, the study examined the amount of exposure the workers had to the noise in order to determine any evidence for habituation. Finally, respondents were asked how they would improve their environment (with respect to noise), and to rate examples of improvements with regards to their job satisfaction and performance. Out of the sample, 99% reported that their concentration was impaired by various components of office noise, especially telephones left ringing at vacant desks and people talking in the background. No evidence for habituation to these sounds was found. These results are interpreted in the light of previous research regarding the effects of noise in offices and the 'irrelevant sound effect'.  ¶ 2:59 pm 0 Comments

  iPED 2007 - Researching Academic Futures iPED this year had just over 110 participants from 18 countries and provided two face-to-face key notes and one virtual + panel discussion that apparently was beset by technical difficulties; the rest of the sessions were three papers per hour slot or hour long workshops. This proved slightly frustrating as only one of the workshops I attended actually attempted to be that and the paper sessions meant that the presenters had to rattle through a report rather than spend time developing thoughts and discussing papers with the audience. We did have good discussions in the extended "workshop" sessions and I caught some good papers on developing a research community, PhD supervision and enquiry-based learning case studies. It was an excellent networking opportunity with plenty of time in between sessions and over meals to chat to acquaintances old and new. The conference dinner at the very scenic and atmospheric Coombe Abbey was preceded by a bus tour of historic Coventry and the leafy Warwickshire countryside, giving delegates a different perception of the "Ghost Town".  ¶ 12:23 pm 0 Comments

  ISL 2007 - Improving Student Learning - for what?

ISL was as informative and thought provoking as ever, more often than not because of the use of the process (discussion) groups which we are all allocated to and which meet once a day and enable you to find out about papers you couldn't get to and follow up gaps in your knowledge, as there's generally someone who has the answer to your queries. Papers are presented in eight parallel sessions of one hour, so one paper per hour block, eight papers at the same time, so you have to make a lot of choices. There is also a poster session on the second day. There were a few immersive experience papers and posters i.e. they dealt with field work, work placements and such like and electrical engineer Michael Flanagan gave an interesting paper on his use of Meyer and Land's threshold concepts work to help students understand electro-magnetic fields. There were three key notes: Ray Land gave us an entertaining talk on speed and slowness in teaching and learning these days, pointing out how troublesome it is when everything is expected to occur at speed (due to technology capabilities) but that creating knowledge and understanding is actually something that happens slowly as you read and consider and write and assimilate. Patricia Broadfoot told us of her attempts as the new VC of the University of Gloucester to get her staff to think about the assessment used in their course (one word from her and it all stayed the same!). She pointed out that assessment is what drives student engagement and so learning and took us through what this meant for the sort learning that was taking place - learning to pass assessment rather "real" learning. Ron Barnett had the unenviable last talk slot by which time everyone was flagging and people were rushing not to miss their connections. The social events (a literary pub crawl with excellent actors and the conference dinner and celidh - more of a concert than a dance until the end when it was like watching your parents dance!- at the old Jamesons' distillery) were also good, especially as I won the t-shirt on the pub crawl quiz!

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  September conferencing At the beginning of September I had a busy time presenting at a couple of international conferences: the Improving Student Learning Symposium (ISL), in its fifteenth year, held at Triinity College, Dublin and the 2nd iPED (inquiring pedagogies) Conference held at Coventry University.

The ISL theme was "Improving Student Learning - for what?" so I presented a paper entitled "Working to learn - valuing placements" looking at learning from work placements. The paper was written in conjunction with Abigail Powell (a social science researcher currently working on a european project in the Department of Civil & Building Engineering). Abi collected the data we analysed and used for the paper while working for engCETL last year.

The iPED Conference was titled "Researching Academic Futures" and my paper titled "Promulgating Pedagogy: Convincing Colleagues" was submitted under the Leading Academic Learning theme (the conference proceedings will be available soon at which time I will put in a link). The paper dealt with the experience of being a pedagogic researcher in the alien culture of a unit not used to conducting pedagogic research, within a university that focuses on subject specific research rather than teaching and learning and a discipline culture, engineering, that is suspicious of an emerging discipline, pedagogy, that it considers less than rigorous due to a focus on perceptions and the use of qualitative methods.

Labels: iPED 2007, ISL 2007

  ¶ 11:16 am 0 Comments