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I’m currently working on a project called ‘FASTECH’, funded by JISC, so any stories on Feedback/Assessment are of interest. I’ve also been working on a module called Manipulating Media for the past 18 months, which we’ve developed with clear expectations of the assignment, ongoing ‘consultancy’, and a mix of peer/tutor feedback:

In a paper entitled “Reconceptualising assessment feedback: A key to improving student learning?”, published in the latest issue of Studies in Higher Education, the researchers say that a “fault line” exists between secondary and tertiary education.

In particular, they say that young people develop a set of expectations about academic support as a result of their experience at school, but when they get to university, these expectations are shattered by what is on offer.

To address this, the authors advise that the first year of higher education should be viewed as a transitional stage between the supported learning provided in secondary education and the independence currently expected at university.

During this year, students should be given “preparatory” guidance before an assignment, “in-task” guidance during the project and “performance feedback” at the end.

The authors, Chris Beaumont and Michelle O’Doherty of Edge Hill and Lee Shannon of Liverpool Hope, say universities should change their approach from isolated “events” of summative performance feedback to a continual “guidance process”.

This should include a greater emphasis on verbal and one-to-one interaction between tutor and student, they say. They also suggest that feedback should be standardised to a greater degree.

Read full story.

Indeed!! Thanks to @beyondchoc for bringing it to our attention…

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Interesting. Networking has always been part of academic life, but there’s clearly been a shift from finding those ‘of similar mind’ to those who can help fund your work…

A significant number of academics feel it is not part of their job to help businesses bring their research to market, according to an investigation into attitudes to knowledge transfer.

Such activity is high on the political agenda, with David Willetts, the universities and science minister, challenging institutions to increase their income from knowledge transfer by 10 per cent over the next three years.

However, scholars often think they do not have the skills to network with the business leaders who could turn their research into a new product or service, according to a PhD thesis written by Kristel Miller, a teaching fellow in management at the University of Abertay Dundee.

About 40 per cent of the researchers questioned who were working with the university to commercialise their work said they felt they had been “forced” to do so, Ms Miller told Times Higher Education.

Read the full story.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150899837380161&set=a.10150899836315161.758741.656235160&type=3&theater

Is this not every academic’s dream? A keen, engaged audience (likely because you are providing interesting, dynamic and interactive content):

It is 3.55pm on a dark winter’s afternoon, but the philosophy seminar on “Radical democracy and Rousseau” shows no sign of flagging.

Eager, earnest students are still desperate to make their final points before the hour is up, awaiting that split-second pause that will let them jump back into the debate.

Close your eyes and you might well think you were listening to a typical undergraduate tutorial, complete with idealistic, left-wing students keen to challenge their classmates, the lecturer and society in general – that is until you hear the sound of the No 76 bus to Waterloo thunder past just a few yards away.

This is actually Tent City University, the centrepiece of the Occupy London camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral, a “pop-up” seat of learning spinning off from the anti-capitalist protest movement.

The flimsy plastic sides of the makeshift marquee are the only thing that separates visitors from the freezing elements and the din of central London traffic, but Tent City University has become one of the camp’s big success stories.

Thousands of people have sat down here to listen to academics, writers and political activists hold forth on a variety of subjects since the camp was set up on 15 October last year.

Read full story.

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We still don’t have anonymous marking, and I certainly find it wrong in a world where we are increasingly giving feed-forward (and therefore would know whose piece of work it is), and are looking for students to provide personalised assignments using online tools such as blogs – which means we HAVE to know who they are:

In recent years, the practice of “blind marking” students’ written work has become almost universal in UK universities. Why? This is because research indicates that some examiners give higher or lower marks to students they know, or whose sex or race they know, than they would if they did not know whose work they were marking. This is obviously unfair and damaging to the career prospects of students who are marked down. So university administrations have taken action by depriving examiners of the information leading to the bias, and insisting that scripts are anonymised before being assessed. But this strategy is misguided: it does not address the real source of the problem and it seriously damages the educational culture.

When I got my first job as an academic in the late 1960s, assessment was a largely intuitive process, in which academics were hardly more articulate about the criteria they were applying than chicken-sexers, and students were entirely in the dark as to what they needed to do to get good marks. I well remember examiners’ meetings in which colleagues would say things like: “I just sensed from the first paragraph that this candidate has a 2:1-ish sort of mind.” We have come a long way since then, with explicit course specifications and the compulsory training of new teaching staff. Nevertheless, we are still a long way from an ideal world in which students fully understand what is expected of them, and staff assess their work solely on the basis of published criteria rather than on the extraneous characteristics of the individual student. In general, academics have not been good at specifying clear criteria by which written work is to be assessed, or at ensuring that their students internalise these criteria, or at applying them impartially.

In my view, the solution to the problem is not anonymous marking; it is to build on the progress that has already been made towards creating an academic culture in which every teacher takes pride in their professionalism and impartiality, and is respected for it by students and administrators alike. In that culture, students will be treated equally on the basis of their actual performance, and will no more need to be anonymised than patients consulting their doctors, or clients consulting their lawyers.

Read full story… which echoes what I’ve written at the top!

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/730831

Just trying to get my head clear….

These are workshop deadlines, etc… and other particularly LARGE deadlines – lots of smaller deadlines, tasks, emails, social media, experimenting, and and and within all my jobs…

*Also likely to remember other things…

January

• 22nd: BigBible Interview for David Bunce
• 24^th: Circulate pilot material for web conferencing
• 24^th: 45 minute session on technology for assessment
• 25^th: Audio Feedback Training (attending)
• 26^th: Article for Transpositions on KCCO/Christianese
• 30^th: Baseline document for ODHE/JISC
• 31^st: Woman to Woman ‘Friendship in a Digital Age’
• *Complete web structure/document, etc. for Big Bible
• *Complete book proposal for KCCO

February

• 3^rd: Social Media for Job Hunting
• 4^th: Review Richard Littledale ‘Who Needs Words’
• 9^th: ODHE Session (Lake Windermere)
• 17^th – 20^th: HOLIDAY: Berlin
• 21^st: Tom Wright Webinar (Lent starts following day)
• 23^rd: Video Presentation Training (attending)
• 24^th: JISC ODHE Event/ Teaching/Twitter Workshop (which one?!)
• 25^th: Essex Media Event
• 27^th: COFE Workshops: Social Media for the Scared/Blogging

March

• 1^st: Review of ‘Sticky Jesus’ for Tim Hutchings
• 3^rd: Digihants
• 5^th: YouTube Workshop
• 5^th: TEL Working Group
• 7^th: Methodist Church schools event?
• 9th: MY BIRTHDAY
• 11^th: Review of ‘Whole Life Whole Bible’ for BigBible
• 12^th: Feedback on web conferencing pilot
• 13^th: COFE: Leicester
• 14^th: PGCLTHE: Week 1
• 14^th: Scanners Night: Talk about social media?
• 15^th: Social Media Training for Federation of Image Consultants
• 19^th: Workshop: Survey Monkey
• 22^nd: Workshop – E-tools for sharing, with Yaz
• 22^nd: Decision on which web conferencing software
• 23^rd-26^th: FEBA Event // Dresden
• 28^th: Workshop: Wimba?
• 28^th: PGCLTHE: Week 2

April

• 18^th-20^th: PELECon: Paper with Nicole
• 24^th: JISC Experts Meeting (talk about Manipulating Media)
• 26^th: COFE Workshops (Social Media for the Scared /Twittersphere)
• 30^th: ODHE Interim Reports
• 30^th: Blogging Workshop
• *Marking Manipulating Media Blogs

May

• 4^th: Workshop: Presentations
• 9^th: Learning Lunch: iPadology?
• 9^th: PGCLTHE: Week 3
• 19^th: DigiGlasgow
• 23^rd: PGCLTHE: Week 4
• 28^th: Workshop: Twitter
• 29^th-1^st: Thinking Digital (Newcastle)

June

• 7^th: Workshop: Facebook
• 18^th-22^nd: MediaLit

August

• HOLIDAY: Scillies: 15^th-21^st
• 24th-27th: Greenbelt

September

• (Paralympics)
• 18^th: COFE: Twitter, Social Media Scared

October

• 30^th: ODHE Interim Project Reports
• * Great South Run

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This story just caught my eye, as there’s that interesting balance between privacy in research and open-ness – this time with legal ramifications. Surely in exposing the data, they will be breaching other privacy laws – e.g. they would have collected the data for a specific purpose, and contract said ‘data not to be released until after death’… Quite concerning.

The folk tale about the academic who accidentally deleted his data is older than the PC, but have you heard the one about the researchers who asked their institution to destroy all their work? No? Well that’s exactly what the researchers behind Boston College’s Belfast Project, an oral history of the Northern Irish conflict, have done.

“The archive must now be closed down and the interviews be either returned or shredded since Boston College is no longer a safe nor fit and proper place for them to be kept,” reads a statement issued by the project’s erstwhile director Ed Moloney and former researchers Anthony McIntyre and Wilson McArthur.

The reason for the dramatic declaration is as disarming as it is simple: within the coming weeks, a court in the US is to decide whether interviews with former paramilitaries in Northern Ireland conducted as part of the project should be handed over to the British authorities. All interviewees, including leading figures in the IRA, the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Ulster Defence Association, were promised that their recordings would not be released until after their death: now they could form the basis for criminal proceedings.

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1338212

Does gender unintentionally affect reference writing, and how much affect does that have upon careers?

The 2009 work to which I am referring (by J. Madera, M. Hebl and R. Martin in the Journal of Applied Psychology) considered letters of reference written for academics, looking at common adjectives used to describe men and women, and explored how these letters – and the words used – affected the actual hiring decisions. In general, women were more likely to be described by rather passive and emotive words (described in the original paper as “communal” adjectives) such as affectionate, tactful, sensitive and helpful. These are words that may indeed correctly describe any individual, they are not negative words, but they may not be seen as central to the job an academic does. In contrast, men were more likely to be described by so-called “agentic” words – words that stress the active sense of doing, rather than merely being, and words that might be correlated with strength. Adjectives that fit into this category include assertive, dominant, ambitious and intellectual. These words convey a sense of mastery over a field, not a predilection to nurture someone else. The reported analysis demonstrated that the use of these agentic words did not appear to have a significant effect on hiring decisions, but the presence of communal words did. In other words, describing women with stereotypical female words disadvantaged the women. Interestingly, female referees were more likely to use these unhelpful, stereotypical words about women than male writers. One can speculate why this might be, but the concern is that – almost certainly unconsciously and unintentionally – many letters of reference contain words that are damaging to a woman’s case, and hence to her future career.

Read full story.

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/321775

Just thought this was interesting, as an academic from Manchester Business School ‘reluctantly’ concludes from his research that we should consider segregating men/women in learning because of their different learning styles.

“Personality differences aren’t aptitude, they’re just differences in…the way you behave,” he said. “It’s not that one personality is better than the other, it just tends to fit people better to certain situations.”

Read full article, and some interesting comments coming through too.