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!

¶ 12:22 pm