First of all, this isn’t a commissioned review – I bought The New Education by Cathy Davidson myself and am (sort of) reviewing it because I found it extremely thought-provoking. In fact, on a recent trip to the States with a few colleagues, I nattered on about it almost non-stop so I feel that I should probably share a few insights from the book. It is worth noting that the book is very USA-focused and so not everything is going to be applicable for everybody. However, there are more than enough shared issues among higher education institutions that the book resonated with me in a lot of different ways. Below, I pick out a few of the sections that I found particularly interesting, and share some of the ways in which they might affect the way that I try to influence teaching at my university:Read More »
Tag: education
Update on Community Collaborative Impact
A few months ago I wrote a short blog post about “Community Collaborative Science” as a model for impactful teaching and research in UK universities. As I mentioned back then, this kind of “service learning” is a core part of the curriculum in many US universities, but has not taken off in quite the same way in the UK. I was discussing the idea with my partner and we ended up putting together a pitch for a NESTA seed grant. The grant would have been used to build the system and pilot a few projects through an online collaborative workspace. Here’s the pitch:
Unfortunately, the pitch wasn’t successful, but there seem to be other people thinking along similar lines. If you are interested in this kind of topic then please do drop me a line and we can discuss this in more detail.
Keeping them engaged – tech solutions for in-class quizzes
When I joined my current institution in 2012, I was offered the role of “Blended Learning Champion” – basically I had to promote a combination of the best pedagogical tools, including in-person techniques and digital technology. As soon as I started, I learned about what became known as “the clicker fiasco”. There was a time, you see, in the halcyon days of 2010/11, when all students in my faculty were given little devices that could be used to respond to questions during the class. It looked a little bit like the one on the right here, and worked extremely well. Lecturers would embed questions in their lectures, the students would answer using the clickers, and everybody was happy. At some stage some inconsistencies in the software versions, or possibly some old hardware (the exact cause is unknown), caused the whole system to come crashing down. What was frustrating about this situation is that there was substantial buy-in from academics to use these technological tools to enhance their pedagogical practice, but the failure of the clickers deprived them of both their favourite tools and their enthusiasm for blended learning. Now, I think I have found the solution: Socrative.Read More »
Avoiding Attack! (a classroom kit)
I blogged some time ago about a Cafe Scientifique talk I gave on the topic of “Avoiding Attack” (broadly mimicry and camouflage in animals). I stole the title of the talk wholesale from the excellent book of the same name written by former colleagues Mike Speed and Tom Sherratt along with Graeme Ruxton). After giving that talk, I was asked to contribute to the Leeds Festival of Science – a great initiative where University of Leeds staff engage local people (particularly schools) with their research through on-campus and external events. As part of that event this year I took part in the “schools roadshow” where researchers go out into schools to teach about their work. I thought I would post the resources that I used here with some notes so that teachers can make use of the materials that I produced. Everything here is released on a Creative Commons license (CC-BY 4.0).
The lost art of foraging
I had a fantastic day out recently at the Great British Food Festival, held at Harewood House in Yorkshire. However, tucked away in the line-up among the hog roasts, cooking demos, and coffee kiosks was a little treat: a guide to foraging. Foraging for food in the wild has enjoyed something of a resurgence in the last decade, after two generations (really since rationing ended in the mid-1950s) of neglect. This has been helped by high profile chefs such as René Redzepi at Noma, a restaurant which has been awarded the title of “best restaurant in the world” in four years out of the last five, where locally-sourced and foraged ingredients are given centre-stage. Suddenly an innocuous-looking green weed growing up between the flags in your garden path has become haute cuisine!
I wanted to share a few interesting points that our foraging guide (Adele Nodezar) offered to the group:Read More »
Pedagogy and a Pint
Academics have many draws on their time: research (grant applications, writing papers, speaking at conferences), teaching (planning lectures and workshops, delivering teaching, marking), and administration (committees on all of the above and more – admissions, marketing, student education, research, outreach). Most of that is just keeping things afloat, and so we sometimes lack the time to develop new ideas and discuss interesting and novel ways of working. Over the past couple of years I have been the “Academic Champion for Blended Learning” in the Faculty of Biological Sciences at the University of Leeds, and that has meant that I have spent a fair amount of time horizon scanning for teaching technology and working with early adopters. However, trying to roll-out big initiatives (like our brilliant new lecture capture system) can be hard because staff have limited time to engage. Recently, I tried something new to give colleagues an opportunity to talk about teaching: “Pedagogy and a Pint”.
Online computer programming courses
Computer programming is becoming an increasingly important part of biology (my own discipline) and a range of other subjects. Programming allows the analysis of data, the creation of software and the building of online resources and interfaces. There are a range of online courses that you can take to develop these skills, and use as teaching aids for students, that cover a lot of different languages with different applications:
Codeschool offers four key “paths” composed of sets of modules in different programming environments: Ruby and JavaScript (two different methods for online application building), HTML/CSS (web design), and iOS (for Apple apps). However, they also offer “electives” alongside the main paths, looking at R (an open source programming language), Git (a method for version control in the development of programming), and Chrome Developer Tools (for apps in the Chrome browser).
Codecademy, much like Codeschool, offers a wide range of programming languages. However, all courses through Codecademy are free of charge. The focus is on web programming using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and application building using Ruby, APIs, and Python. Codecademy also allows people to generate their own courses, meaning that there are many smaller sets of tutorials designed to teach specific principles.
An Example of Use
CodeSchool runs a course called “Try R“, which offers a few hours of interactive training in the R environment. For those of you not familiar with theR language, R is an open source programming language that is mostly built around data manipulation and analysis. The course itself loads within the website, with a simulated R environment within which the student can work. The content covered includes: syntax, vectors, matrices, summary statistics, factors, data frames, and “working with real-world data”. At Leeds we teach our MSc Biodiversity and Conservation students in R for a short period, but this is the kind of tool that the students can use to familiarise themselves more completely with the language. It could also be a gentle introduction to some of the R-based MOOCs that are run by Coursera.
Twitter in teaching
Twitter is known as a “micro-blogging” site, in the sense that communication through Twitter is restricted to 140 character “tweets”. Probably as a result of this slightly unusual nature, it is rarely adopted in a teaching framework, but that doesn’t mean that there are not opportunities to use the platform to help students. Uptake has not been helped by the fact that a relatively small minority of academics are currently using the service, meaning that there is a lack of familiarity. There is also some jargon that you will needto be familiar with to interactthrough this medium:
- Hashtags – these are tags denoted by the “#” character that group tweets according to particular topics. For example, a recently published paper on avian phylogenies might be tagged as #bird #evolution. This makes it easier for users to find and share relevant content.
- Retweets – rather than generating all of your own content on Twitter, it is common practice to spread the content created by others. If someone has posted something you found interesting, you can retweet (designated “RT” within the tweet) to push that back out to your followers.
- Followers – the people who subscribe to tweets from your account are known as “followers” and you will see the option to “follow” other users on Twitter. This is the audience for your tweets.
The good thing about Twitter is that there is a lot of information. The bad thing about Twitter is that there is a lot of information. Using Twitter effectively means being able to take what you can from the stream of data without feeling too bad about letting a lot of it slide past. This can be helped by managing lists of users of particular interest, and by using programmes that interface with Twitter, such as Tweetdeck and Hootsuite.
An Example of Use
As part of a tutorial on research methods, a class of eight second year undergraduates are given the table of contents to three leading ecology journals from the past few weeks and are told to find a paper that they are interested in and engage with one of the authors on Twitter. The exchange should involve questions related to the content of the paper or the authors’ similar work and should fit the format of the medium (140 characters). The students should submit the Twitter exchange, along with a reflection on the experience and the information that was gathered, as an assignment for marking. This kind of activity helps the student explore a medium of communication that is rarely emphasised within university education, as well as developing their online personae and potentially networking with important researchers.
Also think about:
- Using Twitter as a communication tool with the rest of the class (e.g. posting assignment deadlines)
- Using Twitter in-class, by incorporating a Twitter stream on a screen while teaching. Students can then interact in real-time.
Student blogging
I don’t get many readers, but some people do find my blog and that has led to over 70k views for the past few years. I’m quite pleased with that, and it gives me the encouragement to carry on through the dry spells. However, I remember starting out and not knowing who would ever read (or even find) my blog. Now I have students who are setting out into the blogosphere and writing great material so I thought I would do my bit to send some traffic their way. Here is a quick list of their blogs, vlogs, radio shows and documentaries that I have come across recently:
EcoSapien – my former student David has been busy working on a number of projects. EcoSapien is a YouTube show dedicated to spreading awareness about conservation and biodiversity, as well as providing resources for teachers to educate school pupils about wildlife.
North Ronaldsay – David was also the mastermind behind a three-part documentary on the Orkney Island of North Ronaldsay. The show covers the history, wildlife, and people of the island with some beautiful nature shots.
Eye on Wildlife – Emma produces blogs and podcasts focused on wildlife biology and biological conservation. You can also see her talking about How the Internet Can End Global Poverty, from the University of Leeds TEDx event in November 2014 (video should be available here soon).
Simon the Scientist – a mixture of science writing looking at a wide range of (pretty diverse!) topics.
In Search of Ancestors – Simon (a different Simon, just to confuse us) is currently – at the time of writing – working as a field assistant in South Africa working on a fossil hominid project. This blog catalogues his ideas on hominid evolution.
The Roaming Researcher – Dan and I worked together on his MSc dissertation project. Since finishing his MSc, Dan has been travelling the world working on a wide range of field projects and shares his experiences on his blog.
Weekly Wildlife Watch – Tania and Gabriella have been running a student radio show on wildlife ecology and conservation for some time and have managed to get some fascinating folk in for interviews. Go listen and share!
If I have missed anybody then please do let me know and I am happy to update!
iPad apps for academics (Part 2)
I wrote earlier about a few apps that I had found useful in my first weeks of owning an iPad. Well I’ve been actively pursuing opportunities to learn more about the learning applications for tablets like the iPad and wanted to share some of what I have found. A lot of this comes from a workshop by the brilliant Joe Moretti, who came to my university to run a workshop on iPads in education. I hope these are useful to you, too:Read More »
Katatrepsis 