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Canadian Universities – the ones to watch…

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Category : Academic

Canada entered the recent recession in a somewhat stronger position than its G7 peers, in large part because it dealt with its budget deficits in the mid-1990s. Thanks to its regulatory regime, no Canadian banks failed and no government subsidy was needed to prop up their balance sheets. As a result, the Canadian economy is emerging from the recession faster and relatively stronger than other countries’.

The Canadian economy has traditionally relied on its natural reserves and basic manufacturing. Since the mid-1990s, however, the country has been making systematic investments in building its knowledge economy. Canada today boasts a 48 per cent post-secondary attainment rate, the highest among the countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. In Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, 62 per cent of residents have attended higher education and the provincial government has aggressive plans to increase this number to 70 per cent over the next five years.

Read full story.

PGCLTHE: Coaching Assignment

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Category : Academic, Career, Coaching, drbexl

Below is the introduction to an essay I have just had returned from the module “Examining Professional Practice” for the PGCLTHE. The presentation, which I didn’t really have enough time to prepare for, gained me 55%, and the COACHING in Higher Education Essay 66%.

“Since the 1990s the field of coaching has grown in professionalism, and now affects most business sectors. As Parsloe and Leedham outline in their first chapter, coaching and mentoring have moved ‘From Marginal to Mainstream’ for anyone interested in people development. As the profession continues to evolve, professional bodies are emerging, including The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and the International Coach Federation (ICF).[1] Having taught in Higher Education (HE) since 1998, I encountered professional coaching at a CIPD event,[2] and trained as a life coach in early 2009.[3] This assignment offers a reflective consideration of implementing coaching practices within learning and teaching practices in HE. With a particular interest in facilitating group work in seminars, the presentation considered how exploiting learning and personality styles, and offering encouragement, improves student engagement with the process. (Read the entire essay in Word.doc.


[1] Parsloe, E. & Leedham, M. Coaching and Mentoring: Practical Conversations to Improve Learning 2009 (2nd Ed), pp. 3-11

[2] Minter, T. ‘Personal Effectiveness’, CIPD, 2007

[3] Kerslake, D., Boyce, R., O’Donnell, A., Fogarty, C., Professional Coaching Certification Programme, ICF Accredited, The Kerslake Company, 2008-9″

Coaching for the PGCLTHE

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Category : Academic, Career, Coaching

Later today I will be giving the following presentation, which is an assignment towards my Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching. The event is being filmed as we experiment with possibilities for giving more than text feedback on events..

Once the event is over, I have until 1st April to provide a 1500 write-up, echoing the content in the presentation, but also taking into account questions/responses from the audience, which I anticipate to include most of the LTDU, within which I have my role as Blended Learning Fellow. I will then start work on my conference paper for the Hertfordshire Blended Learning Conference, which will count towards another assignment for the Blended Learning module (which I will be teaching next year). Over the summer I will then complete my portfolio in time for September submission… I can then look out for other personal development courses of interest, including training myself up as a PhD supervisor… I’ve really been enjoying supervising Final Year Projects, so it’s the next natural step, right?

Coaching in Higher Education: How Training as a life coach has affected the way I teach

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Category : Academic, Career

Below is the abstract from a 20-minute presentation I will be giving on Wednesday as a part of my assessment towards my PGCLTHE. When the other assessments are complete, which they will be this summer, I will become a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Since the 1990s the field of coaching has grown in professionalism, and now affects most business sectors. Having taught in Higher Education since 1998, in 2009 I trained as a life coach. Drawing upon the work of Kerslake, Whitmore, Parsloe & Leedham, and Draper this presentation offers a reflective consideration of implementing coaching practices. With a particular interest in facilitating group work in seminars, the presentation considers how exploiting learning and personality styles, and offering encouragement, improves student engagement with the process.

Dr Bex Lewis”

If you are on campus on that day and are interested in attending, let me know!

Transferable Skills: Media Studies

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Category : Academic, Career

Degrees in media/communications studies cover a broad range of subjects from the highly practical to the theoretical. You can develop a variety of skills that are extremely useful in many employment areas. These skills include:

  • critical analysis;
  • research;
  • a broad commercial and cultural awareness of the media and creative industries;
  • teamwork;
  • initiation and development of creative work in writing, audio-visual or other electronic media;
  • a flexible, creative and independent approach to tasks;
  • the ability to work to a brief and meet deadlines.

All courses focus on the communication of information across a variety of mediums. Graduates with the ability to communicate information clearly and effectively will be beneficial to any organisation

Taken from Prospects Careers. See also QAA Subject Benchmarks.

Transferable Skills: PhD

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Category : Academic, Career

An article by Pat Cryer explaining the many transferable skills students gain whilst studying for a PhD (1997), and an article from 2004 explaining why many PhDs desert academia.

More information to come on specific transferable skills from my PhD.

In the meantime please read more on http://www.ww2poster.co.uk

British GCSE Mistakes

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Category : Academic, Just for Fun

Following questions and answers were collated from some British GCSE exams in the 1990s. 16 year olds, in case you didn’t realise!

Geography
Q: Name the four seasons.
A: Salt, pepper, mustard and vinegar.

Q: Explain one of the processes by which water can be made safe to drink.
A: Flirtation makes water safe to drink because it removes large pollutants like grit, sand, dead sheep and canoeists.

Q: How is dew formed?
A: The sun shines down on the leaves and makes them perspire.

Q: What is a planet?
A: A body of earth surrounded by sky.

Q: What causes the tides in the oceans?
A: The tides are a fight between the Earth and the Moon. All water tends to flow towards the moon, because there is no water on the moon, and nature abhors a vacuum. I forget where the sun joins in this fight.

Sociology
Q: What guarantees may a mortgage company insist on?
A: If you are buying a house, they will insist you are well endowed.

Q: In a democratic society, how important are elections?
A: Very important. Sex can only happen when a male gets an election.

Q: What are steroids?
A: Things for keeping carpets still on the stairs.

Biology
Q: What happens to your body as you age?
A: When you get old, so do your bowels and you get intercontinental.

Q: What happens to a boy when he reaches puberty?
A: He says goodbye to his boyhood and looks forward to his adultery.

Q: Name a major disease associated with cigarettes.
A: Premature death.

Q: What is artificial insemination?
A: When the farmer does it to the bull instead of the cow.

Q: How can you delay milk turning sour?
A: Keep it in the cow.

Q: How are the main parts of the body categorised? (e.g. abdomen.)
A: The body is consisted into three parts – the brainium, the borax and the abdominal cavity. The branium contains the brain, the borax contains the heart and lungs, and the abdominal cavity contains the five bowels, A, E, I, O and U.

Q: What is the Fibula?
A: A small lie.

Q: What does varicose mean?
A: Nearby.

Q: What is the most common form of birth control?
A: Most people prevent contraception by wearing a condominium.

Q: Give the meaning of the term Caesarean Section.
A: The caesarean section is a district in Rome.

Q: What is a seizure?
A: A Roman emperor.

Q: What is a terminal illness?
A: When you are sick at the airport

Q: Give an example of a fungus. What is a characteristic feature?
A: Mushrooms. They always grow in damp places and so they look like umbrellas.

English
Q: Use the word judicious in a sentence to show you understand its meaning.
A: Hands that judicious can be soft as your face.

Q: What does the word benign mean?
A: Benign is what you will be after you be eight.

Technology
Q: What is a turbine?
A: Something an Arab wears on his head.

Religious Education
Q: What is a Hindu?
A: It lays eggs.

6th Grade History Test Results

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Category : Academic, Just for Fun

The best humour is in the misspelling. Even funnier, read aloud to someone else!

  1. Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies and they all wrote in hydraulics. They lived in the Sarah Dessert. The climate of the Sarah is such that all the inhabitants have to live elsewhere.
  2. Moses led the Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea where they made unleavened bread, which is bread made without any ingredients. Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments. He died before he ever reached Canada.
  3. Solomon had three hundred wives and seven hundred porcupines.
  4. The Greeks were a highly sculptured people, and without them we wouldn’t have history. The Greeks also had myths. A myth is a female moth.
  5. Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.
  6. In the Olympic games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled biscuits, and threw the java.
  7. Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king. While dying, he gasped out: “Tee hee, Brutus.”
  8. Joan of Arc was burnt to a steak and was canonized by Bernard Shaw.
  9. Queen Elizabeth was the “Virgin Queen.” As a queen she was a success. When she exposed herself before her troops they all shouted “hurrah.”
  10. It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented removable type and the Bible. Another important invention was the circulation of blood. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes and started smoking. Sir Francis Drake circumsized the world with a 100-foot clipper.
  11. The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespeare. He was born in the year 1564, supposedly on his birthday. He never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He wrote tragedies, comedies, and hysterectomies, all in Islamic pentameter. Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couple. Romeo’s last wish was to be laid by Juliet.
  12. Writing at the same time as Shakespeare was Miguel Cervantes. He wrote Donkey Hote. The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained.
  13. Delegates from the original 13 states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin discovered electricity by rubbing two cats backward and declared, “A horse divided against itself cannot stand.” Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.
  14. Abraham Lincoln became America’s greatest Precedent. Lincoln’s mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves by signing the Emasculation Proclamation. On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the theater and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture show. They believe the assinator was John Wilkes Booth, a supposingly insane actor. This ruined Booth’s career.
  15. Johann Bach wrote a great many musical compositions and had a large number of children. In between he practiced on an old spinster which he kept up in his attic. Bach died from 1750 to the present. Bach was the most famous composer in the world and so was Handel. Handel was half German, half Italian, and half English. He was very large.
  16. Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.
  17. The nineteenth century was a time of a great many thoughts and inventions. People stopped reproducing by hand and started reproducing by machine. The invention of the steamboat caused a network of rivers to spring up. Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick raper, which did the work of a hundred men. Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabbits. Charles Darwin was a naturist who wrote the Organ of the Species.
  18. Madman Curie discovered the radio. And Karl Marx became one of the Marx Brothers.

‘Customer’ isn’t always right: market model could lead to disaster

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Category : Academic

Prevailing dogma could ruin the academy and produce a generation of dependent, unmotivated, risk-averse students, argues Neal Curtis

Current dogma states that all aspects of society should be subject to the principles and logic of marketisation, and part of this dogma – which is gaining wider currency within higher education – is the belief that quality can be improved through the adoption of the customer model. Fortunately, at the University of Nottingham, the particularity of the student-teacher relationship has not yet been subsumed by the misguided belief that learning is just another version of the more transcendental relation of supply and demand.

Of course I believe improvements can be made to my own teaching, and I know my colleagues commit a great deal of time to rethinking lectures – introducing new research and practical examples that help students to grasp the material we present.

We are committed to student feedback and to new technologies, and are not afraid to rewrite courses or even entire programmes in response to social and cultural changes and the ever-changing needs of students heading into a competitive jobs market.

However, this is all part of “old-school” pedagogy. We do not have to think of our students as customers to ensure our classes are interesting, informative and accessible.

Read full story in Times Higher Education.

Identifying the (Post)Graduate Student

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Category : Academic, Just for Fun

YOU JUST MIGHT BE A POSTGRADUATE STUDENT IF…

  • you can identify universities by their internet domains.
  • you are constantly looking for a thesis in novels.
  • you have difficulty reading anything that doesn’t have footnotes.
  • you understand jokes about Foucault.
  • the concept of free time scares you.
  • you consider caffeine to be a major food group.
  • you’ve ever brought books with you on vacation and actually studied.
  • Saturday nights spent studying no longer seem weird.
  • the professor doesn’t show up to class and you discuss the readings anyway.
  • you’ve ever traveled across two state lines specifically to go to a library.
  • you appreciate the fact that you get to choose *which* twenty hours out of the day you have to work.
  • you still feel guilty about giving students low grades (you’ll getover it).
  • you can read course books and cook at the same time.
  • you schedule events for academic vacations so your friends can come.
  • you hope it snows during spring break so you can get more studying in.
  • you’ve ever worn out a library card.
  • you find taking notes in a park relaxing.
  • you find yourself citing sources in conversation.
  • you’ve ever sent a personal letter with footnotes.
  • you can analyze the significance of appliances you cannot operate.
  • your carrel is better decorated than your apartment.
  • you have ever, as a folklore project, attempted to track the progress of your own joke across the internet.
  • you are startled to meet people who neither need nor want to Read.
  • you have ever brought a scholarly article to a bar.
  • you rate coffee shops by the availability of outlets for your laptop.
  • everything reminds you of something in your discipline.
  • you have ever discussed academic matters at a sporting event.
  • you have ever spent more than $50 on photocopying while researching a single paper.
  • there is a microfilm reader in the library that you consider “yours.”
  • you actually have a preference between microfilm and microfiche.
  • you can tell the time of day by looking at the traffic flow at the library.
  • you look forward to summers because you’re more productive without the distraction of classes.
  • you regard ibuprofen as a vitamin.
  • you consider all papers to be works in progress.
  • professors don’t really care when you turn in work anymore.
  • you find the bibliographies of books more interesting than the actual text.
  • you have given up trying to keep your books organized and are now just trying to keep them all in the same general area.
  • you have accepted guilt as an inherent feature of relaxation.
  • you reflexively start analyzing those Greek letters before you realize that it’s a sorority sweatshirt, not an equation.
  • you find yourself explaining to children that you are in “20th grade.”
  • you start referring to stories like “Snow White, et al.”
  • you frequently wonder how long you can live on pasta withoutgetting scurvy.
  • you look forward to taking some time off to do laundry.
  • you have more photocopy cards than credit cards.
  • you wonder whether APA style allows you to cite talking to yourself as “personal communication”.

Yes – this might be Americanised, but do you realisise JUST how true some of this is! (My postgraduate project)