Group items tagged

Article in the Guardian Education about why students find lectures boring. Unsurprisingly, PowerPoint is mentioned as a factor although reading further it's the usual story of the inappropriate use of PowerPoint rather than the existance of Powerpoint itself. I went to some extremely tedious lectures during my degree...it is possible to bore with a blackboard too! I would be interested in seeing more details of the types of lecture that students actually *like*!

Actually, it's just struck me...we have these awards where students nominate staff. We get a lot of nominations. What is it that students actually *like* about what staff are doing?

David produced a 'tag cloud' of the words used in their nominations.

"Twitter Notes to PowerPoint from The Tablet PC Education Blog by noreply@blogger.com (The Tablet PC In Education Blog) NESI teachers find Dave Johnson's suggested ways to use Twitter improves classroom PowerPoint presentations. They use: 1. The add-on PowerPoint Feedback Slides to insert student feedback clouds with a presentation. They configure it, so they can moderate feeds before they post. 2. The real-time PowerPoint Twitter Ticker Bar at the bottom of the slide to display the last 10 tweets that match the PP slide. 3. The PowerPoint Twitter Voting function to student responses to teacher Qs on a PowerPoint slide. Twitter tallies the results and displays them as a bar or pie chart. 4. The PowerPoint Auto Tweet to push PowerPoint notes out to students via Twitter in real time, as teachers flip to each side. Teachers control what goes out by wrapping tweeted notes in twitter tags. Thanks, Dave, for pointing us to these Twitter functions. Kudos, Teachers for adapting them to classrooms. Johnson, D. Display Tweets in PowerPoint, Send PowerPoint Notes to Twitter. Heiny, R. Accelerated K12 Mobile Learning: Press Release (NESI). Posted by The Tablet PC In Education Blog. February 13, 2009, 3:29 PM. (Retrieved January 15, 2009, 3:19 PM.)"

Clemson University in the US found that students going abroad had a hard time articulating the value of their time overseas to employers, so got them to use multimedia to produce projects which would help them to understand what they had learnt about intercultural exchange. Strikingly similar to the social network project and the module I am proposing in SLLF!

This seems particularly pertinent given all the recent activity in College around the 'Student Experience'. The lastest version of JISC Inform talks about this and this appears to be the launch of their "Student Experiences of Technology" campaign which is bound to yield something useful.

Guardian education supplement examining technology in higher education, particularly so called Web2.0 technologies and examining the student perspective.

Article about teaching in seminars - with useful student quote

Article on using text messaging to reach students at U Wolverhampton. The team that did it recommends that students be offered the chance to opt out.

Maybe interesting to see the results of this study, when it comes out. Msot of it makes intuitive sense (but then I am usually suspicious when that happens ...) I quite liked this exercise: "students are asked to trace the spread of a claim from an academic journal to less prestigious forms of media, like magazines and newspapers, in order to see how arguments are diluted. In another, students are asked to pursue the answer to a research question using only blogs, and to create a map showing how they know if certain information is trustworthy or not."

This is a very interesting study done by Andrea Lunsford at Stanford which suggests that the rise of social software has had a positive effect on students' writing. Interesting to read some of the things the students valued about their participation in the study - peer feedback, detailed editing-style commentary on their scripts & so on.

One day conference at Staffordshire University. Some interesting looking stuff, including "Connecting staff through online peer observation", "Supporting distance learning students via social networking", "Responding to the student voice" and "Learning about digital identity through games and discussion".

A map of resources about the student journey

Yorkshire and North East Hub - Cross cultural issues in the supervision of chinese research students

How a medical student uses evernote for keeping notes on-line

A useful little vignette for illustrating to students why they should not trust Wikipedia as a source!

Article describing how the decreasing amount of contact between academics and students is damaging UK higher education.

Quick commentary piece on working-class students being disadvantaged at universities that made me think of the Transitions project. Also of interest to the Graduate Attributes project: Goldsmiths' mission statement. It offers "a transformative experience, generating knowledge and stimulating self-discovery through creative, radical and intellectually rigorous thinking and practice."

Immediately made me think about someone in a College department, which will remain nameless, who proudly proclaims that they fail a large number of students...like it's some kind of badge of honour! This article would appear to hit the nail on the head but unfortunately it's a problem that's doesn't have a "simple" solution like lowering entrance standards or handing out more Oxbridge scholarships.

Higher student evaluation does not indicate more learning. Important for critique of TEF