I've just received a reminder that I need to set up the paper & teaching appraisal for my summer school paper. This is a series of items that students can answer on a 1-5 scale (depending on how much or how little they agree with each statement), plus opportunities to give open-ended responses to a […]
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considering the transition between school and university
I'm sitting in the sun waiting for the 2017 First-Year Science Educators' Colloquium (FYSEC) to kick off- & it's somewhat embarassing to realise that I hadn't done anything with some of the notes I took at last year's event. However, much of the discussion then is still just as relevant today, & in fact many of […]
Continue readingmore on laptops in lectures
This is a cross-post from my other blog over at Talking Teaching. I type much more quickly than I write (some would argue, also more legibly). But when I'm taking notes in meetings, I do it with a (very old-fashioned) fountain pen & notebook. The reason is that this makes me filter what I'm writing, […]
Continue readinghuman evolution – new discoveries, & how do we accommodate them in our teaching?
What follows is loosely based on a workshop I ran at this year's Biolive/ChemEd secondary science teachers' conference. (A most excellent conference, by the way – kudos to those organising & presenting.) I've added a bunch of hotlinked references. Back when I was in 7th form (or year 13 ie a rather long time ago), […]
Continue readingprofs, publications, & social media
A while back, my Twitter feed brought up a post with the intriguing title "Prof, no-one is reading you". The article kicks off with the following provocative statement: Many of the world's most talented thinkers may be university professors, but sadly most of them are not shaping today's public debates or influencing policies. Now, them's […]
Continue readingfreedom of opinion has its place, but this phd thesis goes too far
One of today's big stories, in the blogosphere and elsewhere, is of the University of Wollongong's decision to award a PhD to a thesis that promotes a strongly anti-vaccination take on the policies and science relating to immunisation. Fellow NZ scibloggers Helen Petousis Harris and Grant Jacobs have already commented on it, and over on Respectful Insolence […]
Continue readingdoes powerpoint make students stupid and professors boring?
This is a cross-post from Talking Teaching. The author of this article certainly thinks so. Under that header, he continues: Do you really believe that watching a lecturer read hundreds of PowerPoint slides is making you smarter? I asked this of a class of 105 computer science and software engineering students last semester. Well, first up, […]
Continue readingshould we stop students using laptops during lectures?
This is a cross-post from Talking Teaching. Image from linguasynaptica I guess it depends on what they’re using their laptops for. Most days when I come in at the back of the lecture room & walk down to the front, I’ll see a lot of laptops open & in use. Quite a few students will […]
Continue readinga learning experiment, and a pleasant surprise
On Wednesday we ran our first whanau tutorial with the first-year students – a class for those students who identify as Māori. The driver for this was the observation that a disproportionate number of the Māori students in my first-year class didn't do well in our first test, & as a result I asked Kevin, our Faculty's senior […]
Continue readinghow do we assess teacher quality?
This is a post originally writing for Talking Teaching. It's a difficult question for universities, but an important one at a time when they are increasingly under scrutiny for the quality of their educational outcomes (read: student completion & retention). It's a difficult question for individuals too! Way back when I was a secondary teacher, […]
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