Category: Education Research

This is research that I, or colleagues do about education. I mainly research veterinary education, but am interested in broader higher education research as well.

Complexity

I have the beginnings of some thoughts about teaching statistical modelling

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One of my fabulous colleagues has started a book club on campus where a group of us work through Advanced R by Hadley Wickham. After the day I learned about the tidyverse, this Advanced R book club has been the biggest set of leaps I’ve been making in my R skills, and I’m probably only understanding about a fifth of it.

This week we began the chapter on functional programming – and Ian’s code and examples are on github. I went home and spent the evening doing this:

There was one example that Ian drew up that I can’t stop thinking about from a teaching perspective. Teaching stats is really, really intimidating, because the more you know about it, the more you recognise how subjective it can be. I often see people take refuge in complexity where they refuse to answer a learner’s question in favour of reiterating the memorised textbook response. I’ve done this myself! At the same time, I’ve had a really intriguing stats challenge with a colleague where I’ve gone around the houses trying to make sure I can justify our choices.

This comes down to model selection, which is one of the most Fun(™) conversations you can ever have about statistics. The more I learn about statistics the more I feel that model selection is the personification of this tweet from my colleague:

You see, there really are no ‘right’ answers in model selection, just ‘less wrong’ ones. This is the subject of a lot of interesting blogs. One of them is David Robinson’s excellent ‘Variance Explained’.

Another of @drob’s posts that I’ve linked to before I’m sure is this one: Teach tidyverse to beginners. This idea fascinates me. David (and I feel I can call him David because I once asked him a question at a demo and he said it was a good question and it was honestly one of the highlights of my life) suggests that students should have goals, and they should be doing those goals as soon as possible.

I don’t know how much educational training the Data Camp/RStudio folks have but I’m always really impressed with the way they teach.

(It’s important here to take a moment to acknowledge the problems Data Camp is having at the moment regarding how they addressed a sexual harassment complaint. I have the utmost sympathy for all involved, and at the moment I don’t feel that boycotting Data Camp is the answer, but it’s worth pointing towards blog posts like this one to give a different opinion.)

‘Doing’ as soon as possible is something we struggle with in higher education. I’ve just had to rewrite a portion of a paper to defend why I think authentic assessment is so vital for science. We put ‘doing’ at the top of our assessment pyramids, and talk about how it takes us a long time to get there.

During this week’s bookclub, my colleague Ian had a great example of using the broom and purrr packages in R to fit multiple models to a dataset quickly and easily. And I had to derail the conversation in the room for a bit. Why don’t we teach this to our students straight away? At present, the way I teach model selection is a laborious process of fitting each model one by one, examining the results individually, and then trying to get those results into some kind of comparable format. After some brief discussion, with all the usual sciencey caveats, our Advanced R bookclub was all keen to use this as a way of introducing model selection to students.

I feel as though this is tickling at the edge of something quite important for higher education, especially for the sciences. Something about empowering students, and getting them to ask me about things I don’t know the answer to more quickly. I also feel just a little irate about the fact I can’t formalise this as nicely as I know David Robinson and the RStudio lot can. I kind of feel like some of the most useful stuff I’m doing lately is in the Open Educational Resources range, such as my Media Hopper channels and on my GitHub. There’s a freedom in OERs to push the boat, and to start teaching the complex things first.

And ultimately, my disjointed ramblings might just help someone else connect a few dots. Happy spring, people!

Lessons in Course Design

By some counts (i.e. the number I list on my CV) I’ve led the design of about thirty higher education courses over the last few years. I asked Twitter what would be the most useful format for talking about those lessons . . .

This is that blog.

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By some counts (i.e. the number I list on my CV) I’ve led the design of about thirty higher education courses over the last few years. And even I have to have learned something by the end of it. I asked Twitter what would be the most useful format for talking about those lessons, and Twitter was very keen on a personal blog, because they wanted the dirty truths.

This is that blog.

Broadly speaking, I have three takeaways from my work on course design. They overlap, of course, because life is messy, but these are what I’ll be taking forward in future. Respect the need for the course, accept that courses will always be co-creations, and while you must try to innovate, you must also recognise why innovation is so difficult. Respect. Accept co-creation. Acknowledge the hardships of innovation.


Respect the Course

At the risk of turning you off this blog post immediately – this was one of my big lessons that made everything ‘click’ the moment I grasped it. On Edinburgh’s Teaching Matters blog I’ve talked about the course design process that really drove this home for me – but at all stages of course design, from the early planning to the third year review, I have found it very useful to go back to why we want the course in the first place.

There are some corollory lessons to this one. If your reason for the course is ‘we want the money’ or ‘the king on high said make it so’, it becomes much harder to find a single cohesive thread that should tie the course together. One of the earliest courses I designed very much came from an edict on high (so high it was impossible to refuse), so the team and I discussed what was missing from elsewhere in the programme. That course became a place to teach the skills that we didn’t have the time to teach elsewhere, and I was very proud of it.  

Having a reason for what you’re doing helps you make the big decisions. How do you decide on an exercise if you need to compromise on timing? If you have a central motivation that drives you, you’ll find it a lot easier to distinguish between the two.

Accept Co-Creation

This one may be more personal. I hate co-creation. I mean, if anyone is listening I love it and team-work is one of my great strengths, but generally I hate it. I think this is particularly difficult when designing a course.

Have you ever given somebody else’s lecture? It’s difficult. Even giving your own lecture, a year later, can be difficult. Lectures are so much a product of you at that moment.

I am a huge defender, and a huge proponent, of the looser aspects of stagecraft that make a lecture. When you see students aren’t following and you stop and regroup – that’s good. When you get diverted away from the beaten path by a really interesting question – that’s good! Teaching adults should not be about sticking rigidly to a lesson plan that anyone could pick up and run with. It needs to be personal.

But with that, comes the difficulty of accepting the other personals in the room. As someone who prides herself on her communication, I am sometimes amazed at how explicit I must be when describing a teaching activity to another. So vice versa, I try to work hard to understand how someone else plans to teach something. This might be something we all need to work on, or just me, but there needs to be more acceptance of how courses arise out of everyone.

And by this I also mean accept the co-creation of the students. My somewhat looser philosophy of the class-plan has also been informed by the different classes I’ve seen. I am still not sure exactly why the same broad cohort, the same rough course, the same timetable slot, can all sometimes result in a wildly different group of students (there’s a study in this!).

It would churlish to express this as ‘no course plan survives first contact with the enemy’ – but recognise that the course you design in your head will not be the same course you actually teach, because your students create that with you.


What Price Innovation?

This final point may end up a blog in itself. In a QAA event this week we talked briefly about student led teaching awards. There’s often a category of innovative teaching. When recruiting staff, I have pushed away from assessing their teaching in terms of its ‘innovation’. What counts as innovation? Is it if I haven’t seen it before? Or if the whole panel hasn’t seen it before?

This year we ran a brand new teaching exercise at the vet school which I don’t think is particulalry innovative. I’ve been doing stuff like it, in other contexts, for years. But the students hadn’t seen anything like it, and they loved it. We’ll undoubtedly be talking a lot more about it in the next six months as we unpack our evaluation.

However, that evaluation will likely underplay the sick feeling I had that morning, my racing heart and the sheer amount of work it took to get us there. Innovation takes a lot work, and a lot of risk.

We ask for innovation when we teach, even though we greatly penalise those whose teaching ‘doesn’t work’. Therefore innovations must always be a sure thing. I feel very safe in my role, comparative to a lot of early career academics, and even I feel frightened when I see that sea of blank faces. Or worse, read that angry comment that the assessment was confusing, or there was no point to the teaching.

I have tried much more that hasn’t worked than has. I’m thinking particularly of an assessment this year where I tried to play about with how some things were weighted (partly due to the discussions we had in the co-creation phase – see ‘accept co-creation’ above, even when the urge arises to assign blame) and I am reverting back to tradition immediately.

I think there is often a push, particularly when you are in that early excitement of design, to do something eye-catching and startling. Think about yourself before you do this. You are the one who needs to run the course.

Sometimes innovation will be hard and painful but still needs to be done, perhaps because it’s the whole reason your course exists. That’s a battle you will need to have. So make those choices strategically.

And if you are in the position to support innovation, anything you can do to reinforce the idea that failure is not going to mean immediate unemployment would be greatly appreciated by those on short-term contracts who probably sacrificed a paper to try something new.

Respect the course. Accept co-creation. Acknowledge the hardships of innovation.

Under Your Eye

I have always felt there was a pleasing symmetry between the observer effect in quantum physics and the study of behaviour. In both cases, you cannot be sure your observation does not change the thing you are measuring.

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I have always felt there was a pleasing symmetry between the observer effect in quantum physics and the study of animal behaviour. In both cases, you cannot be sure your observation does not change the thing you are measuring. When Athena realises I’m watching her, she moves faster towards the plate of toast I had negligently left unguarded. 

But observations also only tell you what’s happening on the surface. I can make an educated inference about why Athena is rushing towards my toast and raking her tongue through the butter, but I can’t know. As I always say, Behaviour X does not always mean Motivation Y. 

I’ve been ‘observed’ a lot this week. I asked one of my academic friends to review my CV. This friend is one of the cleverest and hardest working people I know. I live in fear of my boss ever meeting her, because I’ll be out of a job in a heartbeat. The friend commented “Gosh you do a lot, don’t you? I’m tired just reading this”. 

Well, do I? A CV is written to make me as appealing as possible. Of course I look like I do a lot to that simple observation. Is that a real representation of me?

And then this week I had my first ‘opt out’ lecture recordings as part of our new Agricultural degrees. There was an interesting moment when out of the corner of my eye I saw the light go orange, and I knew I was about to be observed, not just by these students right now, but by other students, maybe other staff, maybe even you (I’m toying with the idea of making those lectures public as I really enjoyed them). 

In a recent Teaching Matters blog I discussed some of the results of our lecture recording project, and the perception that being recorded will change your behaviour. I am really interested by this finding that the act of recording is transformative, and I’m looking forward to exploring it further. And I did change my behaviour when I knew people were watching me. I wrote my slides differently, leaving breadcrumbs for easier navigation, showing them R code so they could return to these lectures after learning R, and using a slightly different method of anonymous polling given the students would be watching it back.

I change when I’m being watched. Athena changes when she’s being watched. Particles may or may not change based on when they’re being watched, I’ve never quite figured out that part of quantum physics. 

But this is not to say the first state, the unobserved state, is fundamentally ‘right’. It’s more an acknowledgement of our innately social states. One last observation (heh). I recently received some paper revisions, and it was on a journal that practiced open review. Someone I like and respect didn’t understand the point I was making in my paper. And because I knew who it was who was ‘observing’ me, I responded to that feedback a lot more positively than I usually do, and I thought “gosh, I wasn’t very clear there, how I can be clearer?” My original state was not better. 

The Gold Standard

This a blog about assessment and urine. I promise there’s more of a point than the punny title.

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This is a blog about assessment and urine. Please stay . . .  

I was very proud of myself this morning for collecting a urine sample from Athena. She seems to be suffering from cystitis, which is common in cats in her demographic. By a bizarre coincidence I happen to have a UTI this week as well, which is a common occurrence in my demographic. The upshot of this is that on Wednesday I saw a GP deal with my case very effectively, and a vet deal with Athena’s case very effectively. Both practitioners impressed me.

In medical education we have a concept, Miller’s Pyramid, which describes the different levels of ability in a practitioner.

  • You know
  • You know how
  • You show
  • You do

Obviously the ‘doing’ is the most important part. Both my GP and my vet did an excellent job of doing, with a lot of similarities in how they handled their respective cases. Both were good at providing detail, providing treatment options, making me feel consulted, and both were respectively gentle with their patients (although I will say Athena was less grateful than she could have been). But large parts of that ‘doing’ is subjective, involving my feelings and Athena’s feelings, as best we can know them.

Let’s take a less medical example. An excellent question for a statistician might be:

Calculate the likelihood of a cohabiting 32 year old woman and 4 year old spayed indoor female cat presenting with cystitis on the same week.

A statistician would need to investigate the prevalence of these conditions in these populations and then calculate how often these populations intersect. We might then ask them to comment on the factors which may make this an under/over estimate, and see if they show enough awareness of the real world to realise that I’m probably more sensitive to Athena’s problems when I’m in pain myself.

Even with this example, which uses lovely objective maths, there isn’t a true ‘right’ answer for doing. You might use different estimates, for example, or you may bring in other information (such as the fact cystitis may be associated with stress, in cats, and possibly in women). The best you can do is give your estimate and outline your thinking as to why this is the case.

At the same time, it’s MSc marking season. We say the gold standard for an MSc is to be of ‘publishable quality’, but in line with #PeerReviewWeek18 (yeah, that is unbelievably a thing), we scientists can’t decide that amongst ourselves. A recent study has shown that as readers, scientists are reasonably good at guessing which papers will not be replicated, and yet we still allow those papers to be published – we are the ones who peer review them after all.

My GP and my vet were responsive to me, and both were very accepting of the ‘grey’ areas in diagnoses. My vet deeply impressed me by strongly recommending a painkiller for Athena (who is currently snoozing very comfortably on my left leg), and my GP was extremely good at parsing my confused jumble of “I’m not sure if this is a symptom or if I’m just overly-anxious today”.

When I was asked to collect a sample of Athena’s urine I thought back to when I used to perform similar tasks in the wildlife hospital I worked in over ten years ago. Then, the assessment criteria (that I perceived anyway) was to perform the task quickly, with economic use of resources and with a minimum of fuss. But this morning I wanted to do it calmly, inflicting as little stress on Athena as possible, and still get to my first meeting on time. Similar task, two different sets of criteria.

The same task in different contexts requires different definitions of ‘doing’ – and good practitioners are adaptable. But funnily enough, this week has made me a lot more confident in ‘assessing’ practice. You recognise good care when you get it, not necessarily because it ‘works’, but because afterwards you feel better. Athena and I feel better today, and even if our respective problems aren’t fixed, we’re better for having seen good health professionals. Vice versa, the next time I think a paper isn’t publishable, I’ll remember that I’m capable of recognising quality when I see it. 

And just an observation, it’s those ‘softer’ skills that my practitioners used to demonstrate their excellence . . . 

A Dangerous Demographic

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I have a bit of a thing for adverts on the internet, because I love looking at how an algorithm decides what I like. (See the book, chapter 11).

But there’s an advert I’m getting a lot lately, and I can’t get it out of my head. The advert is about three minutes long, and thankfully skippable, and it plays in front of every YouTube video I watch. Doing my daily yoga? Advert. Watching a group of gamers murder and mutilate one another (virtually)? Advert.

Towards the end of the ad, the presenter says “Imagine . . . never having to worry about that time consuming process of creating courses and coaching programmes.”

Hold up. Wait. Insert record-scratch noise.

Never having to create a course again?

 

This advert is for a service which will provide you ‘content’ for a price. They seem to be mostly selling blog posts and ‘top 10 tips’ lists. They seem to be talking mainly about ‘coaching’ services, but I can’t get that phrase out my head. “Never have to create a course again”.

Off the top of my head, I’ve been involved in the creation of about 25 courses in higher education. Four of them have been courses which were owned by me, and that I would have to do the bulk of the delivery for. I think that gives me an unusual perspective on course design.

There’s a part of me that very much wants to write a dystopian future novel about a higher education environment where the educators purchase the materials of the course from the same place that sells the answers to the assignments to the students. Yes – I think the next logical step for essay mills is for course creation.

I am being a little flippant here, as I actually think essay mills are one of the greatest failures of higher education. It horrifies me that we have a whole cohort of students, a marketable population who value product over process. I don’t think this company is interested particularly in writing university courses, but I am certain they wouldn’t object to me using the content I might purchase for them in such a way. In fact, I think they would even start working to develop content in that area, if they thought people would pay for it.

It’s interesting that this ad comes up on YouTube because some people on the platform have been paid to promote essay mills in their own content. It’s also interesting that no matter how many times I tell YouTube I don’t like the advert, it continues to show it to me. Something in that algorithm is overriding the information I myself give to Google. I can’t help but wonder if there’s something about me specifically that the company wants to reach. Since GDPR, I’ve had some truly weird and wonderful adverts, including a company who thinks I’m in the market to buy a bulk order of silicone processors (Google Ads thinks I like Business and Productivity Software, Business News and Business Services as well as Computer Components which . . . is kind of disappointing, Google). And I have seen an unfortunate resurgence in the amount of adverts to the all important 30+ woman demographic which means that pregnancy testing companies think I spend all day urinating. (Asides from all the research implications, this has been the biggest issue I have with GDPR. I had JUST trained Google out of this).

What really, really worries me – if that I fit into a demographic here. I know that Google Ads aren’t that clever. And I know how essay mills sell. They say that essay assignments are unfair, are impossible to be marked unless you know the system, and they say they have PhD students waiting to write for you. They talk about unemployed professors wanting to get one over a system that wronged them.

I look at staff who are fighting for pensions, and yet will be punished for this year’s poor NSS scores. I remember the incredulous face of a colleague when I described how that overall satisfaction is actually calculated. I think of the papers which demonstrate that department, not university, not subject, but that little culture of people in a building – is the greatest contributor to variation in the NSS scores.

I wonder how many of those departments, those unhappy and stressed people, who are told that leaving academia is weak and shameful, and I wonder . . .

When they click a YouTube link, do they hear Imagine . . . never having to worry about that time consuming process of creating courses.

 

 

Jill Goes Back to the Chalet School

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It was my birthday recently, and one of my friends gave me an old copy of The Chalet School. It’s one of the best presents I’ve ever been given. I’ve been hunting for the Chalet School books for years, but they’re very difficult to find and seem to be out of print at the moment.

For the uninitiated, the Chalet School series was written by Elinor M Brent-Dyer in the 1920s. It is probably a trope codifier for the ‘boarding school’ genre in English fiction. There are 58 books in the series and I reckon in my childhood I read a good 50 of them. The books serve as morality tales, preaching obedience and diligence to the girls, while recognising that the most fun girls still have character flaws. Jo, one of the great heroes, frequently is described as dishevelled and romantically dreaming of Napoleon’s conquests.

When I was little, I could devour two or three of these books in a week, so I imagine there was a period of about a year when I was obsessed with them. I remember constructing elaborate fantasies in my head about being sent to the Chalet School where I could somehow become Jo, and my two younger sisters would also be sent to the Chalet School and they would cause trouble and I would have to rescue them, while nearby a handsome Doctor would be waiting for me to turn of legal marriageable age. I also remember going through a period of putting brushes in peoples’ beds and being deeply disappointed by my mum’s utter lack of reaction (an excellent example of negative punishment).

I was aware that the Chalet School existed in another time. After all, it takes ten books to get to the second world war which lasts another five books in itself. But reading the book as an adult, there were a few things that jumped out to me. Firstly, I vividly remembered the odd feeling I had when Simone and Jo interacted and I recognise now that I identified their relationship as romantic long before I identified myself as bi. Secondly, the quality of the German in the book is appalling. Thirdly, the imperialistic tone of the book is really quite troubling at times even if you do try to remind yourself it was written in 1925, the same time as The Great Gatsby and Mein Kampf.

But the fourth thing . . . I think we could learn a little about curriculum design from the Chalet School. Re-reading the book, not just as an adult, but as an educator, was fascinating. I was never one to play ‘teacher’ as a kid (my fantasies were more about letting both my little sisters nearly drown in the ice-covered lakes of the Tyrol before deigning to rescue them in the nick of time so I could be lauded by a much older Doctor), so it’s interesting now to note how often the Chalet’s School’s curriculum is referenced. The girls are very much trained to be good wives, with needlework and mending forming a decent chunk of the timetable. They also must be fluent in three languages and possess good numeracy skills (which many of the heroes struggle with).

I’m not advocating a return to home-making skills in our higher curriculum, but in both the #UoELTConf18 and VetEd18 we had discussions about how much higher education should encourage community spirit and social responsibility. There was considerable debate in fact about to what extent it’s the responsibility of universities to do this. Many of my friends and family work in all stages of teaching and I happen to know that (in Scotland at least) there is a focus on community in early years education, so I’m not trying to pass this responsibility on.

In some ways, I wonder if we come at this from the wrong perspective. Perhaps what we’re really asking for is authentic assessment. In my elaborate self-insert fantasies where a handsome doctor was waiting in the wings for me to turn 18, I was being assessed on how good I’d be as a wife. That assessment is unique to each individual pairing, and has unique criteria. I really like Guliker’s et al (2004) framework for thinking about authentic assessment. They suggest that authenticity comes from:

  • Task
    • i.e. a problem which will occur in practice
  • Physical context
    • i.e. in a space that will be equivalent to the space that you’ll be in in practice
  • Social context
    • i.e. reflecting the social structure you will be in in practice
  • Assessment form
    • i.e. the output of the assessment has a relevance or parallel in the real world
  • Assessment criteria
    • i.e. the things you mark are relevant to how that task will be assessed in the real world.

 

If we stay with the Chalet School a little longer, the tall Doctor waiting in the wings will presumably want me to remain calm under pressure around patients (i.e. rescue my drowning hypothermic sisters), in an unsupervised environment (The Austrian mountains), while not pointing out any of my working class roots (jolly good), and provide continued life for my sisters while keeping up appearances the whole time.

I think that when we wring our hands over whether our students demonstrate social responsibility and community spirit, we’re actually bemoaning how our programme design and assessment don’t translate to what the real world values. Unlike the Chalet School, we don’t want to produce good spouses in higher education, but we do want to produce good citizens. And therefore we need to make space in our curriculum and our assessments to reflect that importance.

And if anyone spots any other Chalet School books int he charity shops . . . . do let me know.

Practice Makes Perfect

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I am not yet done reflecting on #UoELTConf18. (Was that a groan I heard at the back?)

There was a great presentation by @Nicolvision & @philshe about their use of Minecraft in the MSc in Digital Education. They showed some beautiful examples of building from their students, of people taking a digital space and making it their own.

I was reminded of two things. First, I have recently gone through a phase of watching the Sim Supply on YouTube. I love watching how he builds these beautiful and complex creations through trial and error. Compare James’ behaviour in the 3×3 house-build and the ‘no mistakes’ house-build and you’ll see how he relies on experimentation and development. Basically, I’m a little in love with James as a learner, because he learns through play, and creates some fabulous things because of it.

In turn, this reminded me of a story I’ve seen passed around Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and other blue-themed social media of your choice. Here’s my rendition.

Once upon a time, in the land of apocrypha, there was a Professor of Pottery. Because TEF was coming in, and she worked at a Russell Group university that was expected to do poorly, she wondered what the best way was to teach her students. As everyone knows, these sort of things can only be discovered through controlled trials, and so at the start of the academic year, she split her class in two. She told Class A that their final grade would be based on a single pot, but it was the only pot they’d be allowed to produce. Their exam was one of quality. She told Class 1 (because she didn’t want to bias them into thinking they were the ‘b-group’) that their final grade would be based on quantity. The more pots they produced, the higher their grade. Quality was not important. At the end of the academic year, she looked over her class’s work, and found that Class A had spent hours, days, weeks, researching and studying and had produced some very nice pots. But the best pots were found in Class 1’s batch. Though they had started misshapen and lumpy, by the end of the year no amount of reading could make up for their experience throwing clay.

The Professor intended to write this up, but was informed that pedagogical papers were rarely REFable, and anyway some noisy bint at a conference pointed out she’d never gotten ethical clearance, so the paper was never published, and the story moved into legend and myth.

Despite my retelling, I actually really enjoy this story, and I think the message is a good one.

I work a lot with fellow academics and with students, and I would say the majority of them subscribe to Yoda’s philosophy of ‘do or do not, there is no try’. Give academics three sheets of A3 and a handful of coloured markers to work with and they will hastily scribble one page just before you send someone round to gather their work. I could not tell you why.

I think these digital spaces – particularly spaces like Minecraft – can be brilliant places to practice making a thousand pots. Because you can also destroy a thousand pots.

At the presentation there were two examples where a student had pushed Minecraft to its limits, and I recognise those experiences from being a gamer. Exploring what cannot be done, and understanding why those limits exist (and where, conversely, they don’t exist), is an oft-neglected part of learning in HE. Thinking just over the last month, I’ve steered at least two undergraduates away from research methodologies that have limits unknown to the students. That’s the right thing to do, because the research project is not the place to ‘break’ something, but I still think there’s great value to finding out how to ‘break’ things. And looking at what can still be done when something doesn’t work. 

Virtual worlds are a great way to play with the boundaries of rules. The very first Halo game had a glitch in the level Assault on the Control Room (here). By exploiting the geometry of the game, you can bypass a trigger to spawn enemies later in the level. The rest of the expansive level is then accessible, devoid of enemies to shoot. Whenever I build e-learning resources, and stack triggers on the user’s interactions, I think about the hours I spent exploring this empty level.

Good learning should create something new, but I think it also incorporates some level of destruction too. Even if only at a conceptual level, you need to break down what you used to know in order to construct your new knowledge. Trial and error doesn’t mean making a thousand pots, but trying to make a pot out of straw, and felt, and all sorts of other materials. I think learning will always be at its best at the boundaries, and virtual worlds are great places to push at those boundaries. 

Hallowed Halls

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Saturday the 30th of June was our graduation for the R(D)SVS students! It was a gorgeously sunny day (perhaps a little too sunny to be wandering around town in a black dress, but I’m not going to complain or the British public will lynch me). And by total coincidence, it was also nine years since my graduation in 2009.

In the intervening nine years, the greatest innovation is by far the fact that the hoods now velcro on to the gowns – but apart from that, there was something that really stuck out to me about yesterday’s graduation. And to explain why I need to talk a little more about graduations.

When your staff come to your graduation, we tell the university what our most recent degree qualification was, and we are ushered into a side room with some lovely chaps who help us into our gowns (and explain the principle of the novel velcro to us). We ooh and covet the nicest robes (Napier’s nursing PhD is the winner for me so far), and start the traditional Glasgow vs Edinburgh rivalry (insert your local university rivalry as appropriate). We file into a room, where the senior officiant convenes a meeting of the Senatus Academicus and in all of our robes, we must all say that we agree to allow these students to graduate.

It’s a moment that we tease each other about, that we joke about, but it has to happen before anything goes any further. We walk through the halls in our order, and process into the hall in front of all your family and friends. We look for the people we know, we cannot keep our faces serious because the happiness is infectious. And then we get to watch you all be inducted into our family, for our family to join yours.

This was my first year processing as staff in McEwan Hall after its refurbishment. McEwan Hall’s dome boasts the inscription: Wisdom is the principal thing, therefore get wisdom, and with all thy getting, get understanding. Exalt her and she shall bring thee to honour. (Proverbs 4:7) There are gilded paintings of all the academic disciplines, and a shrine to Minerva. It truly is a stunningly beautiful building and if you ever have the chance to look inside, you should.

To me, McEwan Hall is sort of sacred. So too is Bute Hall, which I graduated in back in 2009. But I’ve been to graduations in theatres and in modern halls, and they’ve been sacred too. I cry at graduations because if I have a faith, it is in the human ability to pursue knowledge and understanding. I do exalt her.

And in this space yesterday, our veterinary graduates stood up to speak their oath in unison to the Vice President of the RCVS, Amanda Boag. And then Amanda addressed the graduates. In this sacred space, in front of begowned staff, in front of a hundred odd students who she had lead in their oaths, in front of their proud family and friends, in front of one of the people who invented REMLS (that’s a cool thing) . . . Amanda told a story about making a mistake.

Amanda spoke beautifully about failure, and mistakes, and highlighted to the students that they had just swore an oath to try, not an oath to be perfect. The veterinary industry has a lot of problems in the area of resilience, but I think it doesn’t often get enough praise for what it’s trying to do. I think the veterinary industry is having a better conversation about resilience than academia is.

I really hope our students listened to Amanda’s message yesterday, and I hope they remember it. And I want to thank Amanda and the RCVS for that speech. I am not a vet, but I needed to hear about mistakes in that hall, and in that time. It was the perfect place for it, and I am grateful.

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The first university of Edinburgh Learning and Teaching Conference was on the 20th June and I enjoyed myself immensely. There’s lots I want to reflect on from the conference, but it will likely come in dribs and drabs. One of the ways I am trying to practice some ‘academic kindness’ is to not beat myself up about not blogging more. It’s been surprisingly difficult for me to get back into the habit post-book.

But the first thing I want to talk about after #UoELTConf18 is the Twitter conference. I can’t tell if it’s been the switch of disciplines, or just the technology and the users maturing, but I am absolutely loving the conference hashtag over the last few years. For the last couple of conferences I’ve been to, I’ve had just as interesting (if not more interesting) discussions on Twitter as I have had in the sessions.

At AMEE, last year, I expanded my followers list exponentially, and love seeing how medical education at large talks. That community introduced me to things like Bawa Garba case, and a new take on many ethical considerations. At the last few QAA conferences I’ve been to, Twitter has been used to collect questions from the middle of a crowded auditorium, and from more junior colleagues. I’ve been able to question speakers over my allotted time, and in a way that feels (to me) to be respectful and non-pressuring to the speakers.

I also retweet whatever someone tweets about my work – and I’m always interested to see what people choose to share or take away from one of my talks. For example, this is Jen Ross’s take away from our paper at the conference

 

Now I think that’s a fair and concise (thank you, 240 character allowance) summary of what I took twenty minutes to say. But sometimes I’m surprised by what people choose to share of my work. Sometimes I think: “But that wasn’t important at all”, or “You missed the cool bit!”. The more I communicate science, the more I think I’m a very poor communicator. I hope this is the Dunning Kruger effect at work, but then that leads me to wonder that if you’re aware of the Dunning Kruger effect, and think you’re not very good at something, does that mean you’re actually not very good at it . . . ?

I digress.

One of the other fun new things about #UoELTConf18 was that my other talk was a Pecha Kucha. Twenty slides with twenty seconds per slide. I had to write a Pecha Kucha talk differently, and think very carefully about the content of my presentation, as opposed to the style of my presentation.

It’s not groundbreaking to recognise that different formats need different material content, but watching how Twitter can transform my own conference experience has made me think a lot more about the purpose of a conference presentation, and what good content can and cannot make up for.

What my take-home message for all this? Well I have a few. First, I have really started designing my slides with the idea that they should stand-alone, as much as possible. That’s not to say that each slide is made for sharing (see take-home point two), but a combination of simplicity, visual appeal, and a clear idea of what slide is meant to do has helped me a lot recently.

Two – I am clear when I don’t want slides to be shared. I have a little graphic I use to indicate when I would rather a slide not be shared on Twitter, i.e. because I feel the data is confidential, or inappropriate to have an isolated question around. I forgot this in a recent slide deck and reminded my audience verbally instead, and they were very happy to acquiesce. As an aside, I think this might also be something we lecturers might want to consider as lecture recording becomes more wide spread. There’s no harm in a visual reminder sometimes.

And third, I’m going to try and generally remember that improvement happens when you push yourself. Without being a little self-critical, I can’t get better. And if someone picks up on the ‘wrong’ slide once or twice along the way, well they might have just been looking for something else entirely.