I had a very interesting chat with Someone from our History Department today. It seems they really do research led teaching in all its forms. Students review staff publications before release through a blog. Students get to be involved in academic research, and are attributed or acknowledged in published papers. This is a real empowering factor.

The history students even go out to schools and teach school children about areas of history. There are aspirations to do more. These approaches could and should catch on elsewhere.

Student study skills

This is the first report from a new team initiative, show and tell sessions within the Learning Technologies Team. Judith is the first member of the team to bite the bullet and show us what she has been doing for a particular faculty project. We plan to record the outcomes of the sessions in some form. This may be a video, podcast or in this case, a blog post ;-)

Judith Jurowska responded to a request at an Arts Faculty Learning and Teaching Committee meeting to put together a duo course for students to learn study skills. She started from faculty documentation to produce a word cloud and found that the main areas that came through were:

• Information gathering
• Analytical ability
• Referencing
• Essay writing
• Time management
• IT Skills

With help from the library and some of the department, Judith has put together a range of materials from existing content and from the web. Rather than re-invent the wheel, Judith took advantage of existing resources online. The materials now need some ownership from the academic staff in the faculty.

As a team, we think these materials could be equally useful for Sciences and Health and Social Science students. There is also the suggestion that the materials might work well in a wiki, or that a wiki could be added to the course.

Judith is ensuring that her work compliments and draws on projects undertaken by the library (providing library and information literacy tools), as well as those taking forward the Durham Award (a scheme to give students recogntion for transferable skills and non-academic activity). When finished and signed off, we would consider pushing out to colleges and tutors to promote.

Training Strategy

Staff feedback suggests that Summer and Easter are the best times for formal training sessions. Just in time training is both increasingly popular, and successful in getting staff to use the technology successfully in thier teaching. The Faculty Learning Technolgists are providing a great service in that regard.

• Some training naturally lends itself to the summer, particularly "Redesigning your courses" and "Authoring Online Tutorials".
• Others are more assessment driven "Preventing Plagiarism" and "Tests and Quizzes" and can take place later in the term.
• Blogs, wikis and podcasting can be helpful at various times throughout the year.
• For the summer of 2009, the move to BB 9 is key.
• one to one sessions are useful cover for periods when there may not be enough availability to put on full workshops.
• The plan needs to incorporate focus groups and previews at Easter and conversion courses in the summer.
• We need to establish an approach to providing appropriate training in Stockton. At present, we do not have mechanisms for establishing need and availability for what is a more limited audience. Regular survey or doodle lists may determin interest at Queens so that we can target training appropriately.

Good practice blog

We are looking to capture good practice quickly and easily. Following Andy Ramsden at Bath University, we are going ot give blogs a try. I think it doesn't require us all to use the same blog, so long as we can aggregate the results somewhere.

• I would like to be able to blog from my mobile.
• Something that easily takes video and audio is important.
• In an ideal world, it would be great to tweet the blog.
  

Must find out what plug-ins are available for Blogger.