Teaching Exchange 2013

This years Teaching Exchange had drop in slots with talks and a demonstration. Featuring some of the winners of the VC's excellence in learning and teaching awards....

#badacademia

This letter appeared in the Independent.  It raises several concerns about Gove's new curriculum

"We are writing to warn of the dangers posed by Michael Gove’s new National Curriculum which could severely erode educational standards. The proposed curriculum consists of endless lists of spellings, facts and rules. This mountain of data will not develop children’s ability to think, including problem-solving, critical understanding and creativity." 
It was also signed by over 100 academics from universities across the country many of whom are experts in education and have published multiple books and papers on education.  
The academics state that Gove did not take on board the advice of experts when designing his curriculum and as such is sacrificing a good education for rote learning which will severely affect educational standards.
Gove's response was this was to shout at the academics for living in their ivory towers and being an example of bad academia.  How ironic!  

@ThomsonPat: So Gove read my 12 books  140+ peer reviewed journal articles in 2 days as well as those of my 99 colleagues? - Pat Thompson - Professor in Education

This led to @timeshighered encouraging academics to take back the term by using  #badacademia on twitter to tweet about the good education that happens in spite of Gove.
Some great tweets below:

Turn that phone on! Mobile technology in the classroom

This PRF session featured a talk by Anna Hunter who used mobile learning and TweetDeck to encourage engagement in the classroom. Students were expected to set up a twitter account if they didn't already have one by the next session and bring a smartphone or laptop....

VC's awards for excellence in learning and teaching

On Fri 7th Dec 2012 we celebrated the second annual Vice Chancellor's awards for excellence in teaching and learning. 

Hands on assessment

I was inspired by this article on how hands on science assessment are a much more accurate reflection of student comprehension. The computer based and physical tasks set for the students, involved much more than you would ever get out of a pen and paper exam, and the students got much more out of it. The study was conducted by the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress)

Other kinds of "impact" REF 2014

David Willetts speech-at UUK conference today was interesting for many reasons. The biggest 'impact' for me was where he was talking about what will be REF'able and how research will be assessed for the Research Excellence Framework 2014.
The most surprising thing was that you could include unpublished work and journal impact factors would have no relevance!

Supporting the research process

Research is a pivotal part of Higher Education, all universities do research to some extent, even if it is research into their teaching that never get published in peer reviewed journals.