The awesome ProfHacker with a step-by-step guide to quickly getting a bunch of dates into a Google calendar. The author is using it specifically in the context of a course syllabus, but I thought it might also be useful for putting in things like PGCAP dates.

QM's efforts in developing ways to recognise teaching excellence get a mention in the THE

More ProfHacker on plug-ins for WordPress in academic settings

ProfHacker column on useful plug-ins for WordPress when using it in the classroom.

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!

Interesting experiment with peer assessment from a Duke prof. She stopped assigning marks (though she read every piece of work and gave feedback), the students marked each others' work, and the quality of the work improved.

Coauthored by Ien Ang who is a scholar whose work I like. From the intro: "This paper emerges out of an interest in exploring the possible implications of Web 2.0 for the practice of humanities research. Scholars in the humanities have traditionally been dependent on the written word - on the production of intellectually dense discourse - and, in this producerly mode, they tend to be individualist, sole researchers. How can they respond to the challenges posed by Web 2.0 and its seemingly irresistible promotion of a participatory, expressive, and highly visual mode of cultural production?"

A way to cut marking time in half (& save yourself from getting repetitive strain injury)! Sounds brilliant. I'm going to try this with my Drapers' Skills Award assessments (as I have Dragon Naturally Speaking on my machine already). I like what he says about making marking into a conversation with students.

HEFCE consultation on the REF.

Another use for the text messaging services we are considering in ESD?

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.

Social networking as the means to reviving students' flagging literacy skills? This short post gives the background to a bigger study by Andrea Lunsford, the Stanford Study of Writing (which I shall bookmark separately_.

Good lord, the apocalypse is upon us. Machines are marking essays.

Article by Stanley Fish which raises some interesting questions about the place of writing in university study, and whether it should be embedded in the disciplines or taught separately. It plays into wider debates about canon-formation. More relevant to the US system but still interesting I thought.

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."

These referencing exercises come from a LearnHigher study (which includes some staff development exercises - go to http://www.learnhigher.ac.uk/Referencing/View-category.htm to find these).

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."

Inspired to bookmark this from the grad attributes consultation in which one group had two members who were engaging in 'destructive group behaviours' (brought onto the straight and narrow eventually by a skilled facilitator) ... I have heard it suggested that if groups are being derailed by dominating or digressing types, it can be useful for the whole group to sit down and consider what kind of group member they are in order to limit their unhelpful behaviours and get the group working well again.