Key notes in instrumenting change

Higher Education Academy Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics

Nottingham, 29th January

Simon Lancaster

Show your device some love

Find something that you like

“People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.”Charles Farrar Browne, 1863

Concepts

Innovation?

Quotations? Creativity?

Evaluation?Evidence?Suggestio

ns?

Technology

In a room full of Higher Education professionals can we manage without clickers?

Where I disagree with Yoda

“Do. Or do not. There is no try.” Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back

Pedagogical innovation ambassador

“For his innovative use of technology to engage, challenge and enthuse students by blurring the boundaries between the lecture theatre and the internet.”

“Professor Simon Lancaster… …now divides his research interests between energy materials and innovative approaches to enhancing student engagement.”

Is dereferentialisation a modern scourge?

Bill Readings, The University in Ruins, 1996

‘The modern university’s pursuit of excellence is a meaningless search.’

Dereferentialised but endearing terms

Building the new

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”SocratesA fictional character called Socrates in a book by Dan Millman.

Let’s try an experiment!

Raise your left hand if you are (or recently completed) merging modules (units) to create fewer modules each carrying more credits.

Raise your right hand if you are (or recently completed) splitting modules to create more modules each carrying less credits.

The Hawthorne Effect

Quotations

Who said?

“In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.” Civilization Past and Present by T. Walter Wallbank, Alastair M. Taylor and Nels M. Bailkey.

Innovation

Online

“What can go online should go online”Prof David Read

The courage to cut

“education gives to us that which remains after we have forgotten all that we have learned in the schools” E.D. Battle, 1899

Education

What should be the objective of our questions?

Summative versus Formative Assessment

Let us generate some data

highlyreflective

reflective neutral absorbing highlyabsorbing

Let us abuse that data

1 2 3 4 5

Hitch Hikers Guide

"'Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.”

Evidence

9 12

25

54

Student activity

Thinking PI Interactions Lecturing

Data by kind permission of Anna K Wood, Ross K Galloway, Robyn Donnelly, and Judy Hardy, manuscript in preparation.

Collaboration

Beyond open educational resources

Networking and impact (socioviz.net)

Suggestions

“People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.”Puck magazine, 1903 (i.e. Not Shaw or Confucius)

These are my principles

“These are my principles. If you don’t like them I have others.”Almost certainly never said by Groucho Marx. It has been attributed to New Zealand 19th century politicians.

Acknowledgements

Peter Drucker (1969)

“An organization, whatever its objectives, must therefore be able to get rid of yesterday’s tasks and thus to free its energies and resources for new and more productive tasks.”“Rather it is organizational inertia which always pushes for continuing what we are already doing. At least we know—or we think we know—what we are doing. Organization is always in danger of being overwhelmed by yesterday’s tasks and being rendered sterile by them.If a subject has become obsolete, the university faculty makes a required course out of it—and this “solves the problem” for the time being.”