Enhancing the student experience through in class technologies

City University kindly hosted this meeting to consider organising a Special Interest Group on the subject of classroom voting systems. We hope to facilitate an online community and informal events to build a knowledge of good practice and promote appropriate use. Case studies, research and evaluation are on possibilites, but the group agreed to begin with a light touch approach. deciding on a title for the group was tricky, but important. There is a lot in a name. Objectives were easy to decide.

While the initial focus is on voting systems, I was pleased that we kept the brief more open to potentially include other technologies that engage students in face to face teaching sessions, be they mobile or less high tech voting (coloured cards or cubes).

Archives and Special Collections

It is amazing the resources that Durham University has. Sarah Price from the Palace Green Library gave a fascinating, enjoyable and useful presentation and tour of the Palace Green special collection today. She is keen for more people to take advantage of the collection. She has helped teachers and students from history, classics, anthropology, the sciences and engineering to take advantage of the collections.

There are a range of materials that would be of interest to researchers and teachers across subject multiple subject disciplines (not just history). There are science manuscripts, old maps, legal documents, novels, records, photos and even spears! One item, a death book, detailed how different people in London had died during the era of the plague. Causes of death recorded include "teeth" and "impotence".

Sarah does a lot of outreach work with schools. She is also involved in many education digitisation projects where the archives are made available online. Things that are not digitised already could be on request. There is a lot in the collection which could be used, and Sarah is keen to hear from people who are interested.

Voting systems still working for Durham Psychology Department

The Psychology department were amongst the more enthusiastic adopters of classroom voting systems at Durham University. I'm pleased to hear that they are still making good use of the 'clickers' a few years on. The usage pattern followed the usual Gartner curve from enthusiastic adoption and early experimentation, before settling into a model of continued use. They found a range of uses for them, from seeding discussion to collecting data. One lecturer adds to their research data set every time they present their results by gathering more data from the audience in the course of the presentation. They are also using them in outreach activity to schools, and on Open days to show the range of teaching techniques they employ.

Pedagogically, they ensure interaction for the whole class, and helps the teacher to adjust teaching based on what the students know. For example, one lecturer asked a difficult question at the beginning of the course to see what the students knew. The answers ranged from those expected from a novice, to those expected from someone who had passed the course. To his surprise, most chose the response expected at the end of the module! he had to adjust his teaching for the rest of the course, following the same outline and towards similar outcomes, but in a different way more in keeping with the student's understanding.

"Patterns" and learning

How can we share and communicate good practice. Colin Ashurst sees 'Pattern language' as a means of achieving this in various contexts. The approach is commonly associated with project management, and seems to have come from architecture (See http://downlode.org/Etext/Patterns/).

AS I understand it patterns are quick ways of reifying tacit knowledge without explaining so much that it becomes meaningless. It is a form of quick documentation that considers both the audience and context.