This is something I wrote for Talking Teaching. It doesn’t have a strong biology focus, so I hope my ‘regulars’ will forgive me :-). but I’d like to generate some discussion around this issue. Over the years I’ve had a fair number of conversations with my students about what’s involved in being a university lecturer. […]
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changing teaching techniques
This post’s title is another one drawn from the search terms that brought people to my ‘other’ blog at Talking Teaching 🙂 I’ve written quite a lot about the benefits students may gain as a result of lecturers changing the techniques they use in the classroom. A while back I wrote about the idea of helping […]
Continue readingensuring student success
The other day my colleague Nigel Robertson (from the uni’s centre for e-learning, "WCeL") sent through a link to this article: Ensuring student success – students are not to blame. The writer, Arshad Ahmad, begins by saying that [many] students may appear to be unqualified, unprepared and uninterested. But if you believe, as I do, […]
Continue readingcute, creative caminalcules
This post was originally written for Talking Teaching, where it has the title "what is the caminalcule lab supposed to teach?" You can get some good ideas for posts from reading the search terms that bring people to your site 🙂 I was first introduced to the Caminalcules way back in the dim dark past […]
Continue readingin the rush to ‘e-learning’, are we losing sight of our goals?
One of the ‘big things’ in schools these days seems to be the increasing expansion of e-learning. I’ve written previously on one school’s decisionto require all its new students to have iPads, or similar tablet-style computers. At the time I worried about whether, in the rush to embrace new technology, the question of whether its […]
Continue readinghere be dragons
This post is also on Talking Teaching. Over on SciblogsNZ we had a bit of a discussion around the issue of science & belief systems. How far should scientists, & those who communicate about science, go in ‘pushing’ against strongly-held beliefs? (These could include creationism, but also beliefs about ‘alternative therapies’ such as homeopathy & […]
Continue readinghave universities degraded to teaching ‘only’ scientific knowledge?
The title for this post is taken from one of the search terms used by people visiting my ‘other’ blog (the one I share with Marcus & Fabiana), Talking Teaching. It caught my eye & I thought I’d use it as the basis of some musings (which are re-posted here). We’ll assume that this question […]
Continue readingchoosing for the future
This one’s really intended for students in year 11/12, & their teachers & parents – those of my readers who are in year 13 will already have worked out where they’d like to be & made their subject choices. In the weeks before the start of the A semester, my diary rapidly fills up with […]
Continue readingmotivating tomorrow’s biologists
That’s the title of Susan Musante’s paper in the latest issue of Bioscience (& many thanks to David Winter for sending it on). It’s a summary of some key points made by speakers at an NAS convocation called "Thinking evolutionarily: evolution education across the life sciences." Now, I find science fascinating, exciting, & endlessly interesting, […]
Continue readingcritical thinking – a classroom resource
I joined Facebook about a year ago – primarily to access the NZIBO pages, but subsequently I found I quite enjoyed keeping up with what friends & family are up to. More recently I’ve added ‘entities’ like ScienceAlert, & through that particular link I’ve just found an excellent series of short videos on critical thinking. […]
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