ELATE09 We're getting ready for our annual teaching and learning conference ELATE09 which takes place, as last year, in the Lanchester Library on campus. This year I've managed to get two externals to contribute to our Engaging with the Experts seminar series and facilitate workshops on the day. I look forward to welcoming Karen O'Rourke from Leeds Metropolitan University and Harry Hubball from the University of British Columbia to run workshops on enterprise and enquiry based learning and learning centred curricula. These workshops are also open to those external to the University, so if you're interested contact info.cshe@coventry.ac.uk  ¶ 12:54 pm 0 Comments

  Engagement, elections and redeployment So lots going on at the moment: been asked to contribute to an international panel on student engagement for this year's ISSoTL conference, standing for election as treasurer in ISATT and facing redeployment as they close our Centre at Coventry University!

Last year's ISSoTL conference saw the creation of a student engagement SIG by interested parties in attendance. We were asked to contribute our own, our colleagues' and our students' definitions of student engagement, you can see our take on it by visiting our group page (I think it's open access). Connections made there gave Elizabeth the idea of bringing together four collaborators to discuss "Terms of Engagement":

• Elizabeth Barkley, Foothill College, Los Altos, U.S. (Chairperson)
• Norman Vaughan, Mount Royal College, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
• Kelly E. Matthews, University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia
• Sue Morón-Garcia, Coventry University, UK

I'm going to be looking at our PGCert in Higher Education Professional Practice to add a different flavour to the usual focus on undergraduate students.

I was recently approached to stand for election for Treasurer in The International Study Association for Teachers and Teaching (ISATT). This is a friendly, welcoming, multi-national group of researchers and teachers I discovered through their excellent and thought provoking conference on "Totems & Taboos" two years ago (follow this link and scroll down to find out about that). We won't know the result until this year's conference in late June / early July.

And finally ... we recently found out that they are "reorganising" us and shutting down our Centre. We're currently in the "consultation" period and all feeling a little raw, angry and anxious. Some of us are taking more proactive attitudes and looking around us, as you might understand if I say we don't exactly feel valued around here, although we are promised redeployment.  ¶ 11:12 am 0 Comments

  CALRG 30th anniversary Just spent the day at the above, details of which can be accessed from the Cloudworks site. Spent an entertaining day being whisked back to the past and into the future with current and past collaborators. Here are some thoughts captured from the day:

• "for technology to take off it has to appeal to young people and fit into their social life" Mike Sharples
• "we need to understand what people are doing with information to design better technology" Ann Blanford
• "it's very hard to capture pedagogy" & "it slips through your fingers" Diana Laurillard
• to paraphrase Grainne Conole: lack of reuse meant we needed new pedagogies, Cloudworks helped make the design process more explicit
• Andrew Ravenscroft worried that we were encouraging "home brew intellect" vs "Grolsch intellect" with all this Web 2.0 stuff!!
• Tim O'Shea identified electronic assessment as a Big Issue i.e. why are we assessing with pen and paper when students use e-devices normally?
  

  ¶ 6:35 pm 0 Comments