Art at Reading has a new digital platform to connect staff and students. OSCAR, the Online Studio Community at Reading, has been developed to support the vast range of teaching and learning activities that happen across studio modules in Art, within the department itself but also off-campus and internationally. Continue reading
An email this week from Hatchpath telling me that around 10% of our UG stduents had signed up for it led me to look at some of the large part 1 modules in Biological Sciences to check the usage. Continue reading
Neil Morris, author of Study Skills Connected, a new book on using technology to support Teaching & Learning, visited Reading last week to speak about ‘Making technology-enhanced learning work for staff and students in Higher Education’ as part of our Teaching & Learning Seminar series.
Neil, who lectures in neuroscience at the University of Leeds, has conducted a number of research studies investigating the impact of technology on students’ learning experiences, and was able to share with the audience – over 30 colleagues from academic and service departments – some of his approaches and experiences, as well as data collected from use with his own students. Continue reading
Managing emails, to-do lists and calendar appointments is an office skill which more and more people are finding they need to develop as an increasing amount of our working lives is spent fielding queries and chasing up tasks from behind our computers. Colour coding these Outlook tools is not a new concept for many administrators or PAs however it is starting to become more and more relevant for those not in support roles who simply find themselves communicating with colleagues via email and generating a large amount of correspondence which often needs to be referred to at a later date. As such I have been asked recently to help teach non-administrative colleagues about how I make Outlook work for me, and in turn how it helps me to be a more effective administrator. I hope this blog will help anyone not already using this method of Outlook management. Continue reading
Our Teaching & Learning Showcase Series continued yesterday with a session on ‘Sharing good practice in the use of Turnitin’. Turnitin is an online service which allows educators to check students’ work for similarity with other sources as a tool for plagiarism prevention and development of academic writing skills.
Turnitin automatically generates an ‘Originality Report’ with a ‘similarity index’ expressed as a percentage, and links to matched sources, including other students’ work, the internet, and other publications. It’s available at Reading through the University’s VLE Blackboard as well as a web portal. Continue reading
The second part of my research into digital literacies for student employability has focussed on in-curricular placements here at Reading. Every undergraduate programme now has an embedded placement option.
On site at Silchester
The ‘Skirts’ model includes maxi, mini and micro placements. A maxi placement could be a year in industry as part of a four-year degree course. A mini placement is equivalent to a whole module, such as the compulsory Silchester Field School module that all first-year Archaeology students take. A micro placement forms a part of a module, for example the Real Jobs Scheme in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication. Continue reading
I’ve just stumbled across http://hatchpath.com, a site for student exchange of information on their modules. It seems to have very smooth and intuitive tools for information sharing and strikes me as quite Facebook-like in its approach to making things easy. It took me less than a minute to sign up and find a list of Part 1 biology modules I might be taking at the University of Reading.
There is an introduction to this software in the University’s student newspaper Spark of 25 October 2012. In the comprehensive interview the developer of Hatchpath discusses many of the difficulties of using Blackboard encountered by students. It’s very easy to understand some of these frustrations.
It’s good to see that during our JISC Digitally Ready project we have been chosen to be the institutional guinea pigs for this project:
“DT: So is that why you’ve chosen to launch the Hatchpath beta here, because of that personal connection to Reading University?
PT: In a sense, yes. All of my friends were at Reading University- we already knew some students at Reading University who could help get the word out. So that’s what made us select Reading University. Also another reason we selected Reading was because we wanted to start with a top-class university, a very good university of good standing who can appreciate what we’re trying to do. I have friends in other universities around the country but I think Reading is the best option.” (Spark, 25 October 2012)
This software is quite separate from Blackboard but overlaps with the use of the discussion board and wiki areas and this could potentially lead to complications for those staff who use these tools in their assessments however it also has quite a Facebook like feel and may allow. The current Hatchpath is a beta version and I’ve noticed a few glitches when running it on my iPad such as in inability to close some pop-up windows without using the back button on the browser. As a long-term frustrated user of Blackboard, I’ll be following the progress of this software with interest.
SEED Placement Students – From left to right; George Brewster, James Buller, Harriet Taylor, Rachel Glover, Shay Mullineaux and Seb Lear.
Last week SEED students were invited to present about their experiences at the SEED Showcase event. The evening was an opportunity for placement supervisors, employers, parents and fellow students to see the kind of things a SEED placement entails. There were many familiar faces because I had previously interviewed many SEED students for my research on my own placement. We each had only seven minutes to impress our panel of judges, which included Peter Finnan from Opsview, and Kara Swift and Emily Shaw, both representatives from RUSU. In our presentation we needed to get across what our placement was, why we applied to do a placement, what we did from day to day, how we made a lasting impact, and how all these experiences might be valuable to us in the future, before taking any questions from the judges. Continue reading
Like a lot of people, I do not consider myself particularly savvy about technology: when I find that something is useful to me, I learn how to use it. That said, I think we can use learning technologies to come up with ‘low tech’ solutions to our teaching needs. Among the advantages is efficiency in terms of time and money: we already have the kit, and we know how to use it. I offer the following as an example. Continue reading
