Category: Uncategorized
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Is written feedback on assignments useless? Listening to Phil Race at Gloucestershire..

On January 20th, we had the pleasure at Gloucestershire to welcome Phil Race, to spend a day with us, talking primarily about the issues of assessment and feedback in Higher Education. You can read more, and download the slides he used, via his blog post about the visit, but I want to focus in here…
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Getting High in the Low Countries.

Originally posted on Dispirited: This is a piece I wrote for the Holdbreaker Climbing blog. The original is on their blog, but they seem to have had some technical issues recently, so am mirroring it here… Middle-age, it seems, is full of surprises. Of twists and turns that befuddle attempts at prediction and sense-making. These thoughts…
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Eric Stoller talks about Academics and Social Media

At the University of Gloucestershire, in September 2016, I interviewed Eric Stoller about the keynote lecture that he’d just delivered to our Faculty Learning & Teaching Symposium. The lecture had been about Why Academic Must Use Social Media. I invited him, after hearing him speak on a related topic at JISC’s 2016 DigiFest, and he has shared…
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National Teaching Fellowship 2016

Really pleased to be able to announce that I’ve been awarded a National Teaching Fellowship by the Higher Education Academy. Obviously I am pleased in a vain, ego-driven, seeker-of-external-validation-in-order-to-justify-my-pointless-existence, kind of way. But there is more to it than that. Where I think the NTF scheme (actually) matters is the focus it puts on learning…
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Interview for Innovate Learning Review

After the recent e-learn conference, I did a very brief interview for AACE’s Innovate Learning Review. I think I also did a video interview for them, but I was so congested, it would have been incomprehensible – so I am glad they seem to have used their better judgement on that one! You can read…
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A decade in a grain of sand: e-learn lessons, ageing, and reflections.

Reflecting on the ten years separating e-learn 06, from the 2016 event, and what has changed. Time has a habit of slipping by. This is worse as we age, as the decades that rush by us represent a smaller proportion of our life thus far. Having speculated a little about middle-age elsewhere, it’s probably wise…
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Reflections on the use of ‘Real World’ in Education.. from e-learn16.

Here at e-learn 2016, I was delighted to be able to listen to our first keynote session, from Digital-Natives-coining speaker Marc Prensky. He didn’t get into the whole debate about that term, but rather concentrated on his most recent publication and the ideas behind it. This was a powerful plea to redesign the educational process from…
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e-learn16 – arrival reflections..

My first real encounter with e-learning, technology-enhanced learning, and the way educators use the opportunities it reflects, in a coherent organised way (I had been prone to playing with VLEs, audio and web-sites before, but rather haphazardly) was at AACE’s e-learn in 2006. I came home and immediately started (what became) www.rpeglos.com – a course…
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Digital Trends in Higher Education, and actual students..

While it is clear that McGraw-Hill Education is not a neutral player (as a leading publisher and advocate of digital learning solutions), but nonetheless, the headline results from their survey of over 3000 US College students are eye-catching. Amongst their student respondents, it is clear that there is at least a perception that digital offers…
