Supporting student learning in 2020-21: avoiding a common misstep
One if the many important questions to have arisen during the current pandemic, is how we can effectively induct and orient students into new ways and, indeed, new modes of learning. Although this is to be very much welcomed, some of us would also want to caution against and unfortunate move people sometimes make when […]
“So, can we say ‘skills’?”
As those whose unhappy lot in life it is to have to listen to me moaning on about matters educational will know, I’m not a big fan of the term ‘skills’. Or, more precisely, I’m not a big fan about how this term is often used. I’m even less keen when it’s preceded by […]
The Knowledge ‘versus’ Skills Debate, Part 1: forgetting what we know about knowledge.
One of the many poorly-framed, point-missing ‘debates’ that regularly plague contemporary education goes something like this: ‘should education be focused primarily on teaching knowledge, or on developing students’ skills?’ Even attempts to reconcile the (apparent) ‘knowledge .v. skills’ opposition with reasonable-sounding appeals to its being ‘a bit of both’ miss the main point – namely, […]
The Knowledge ‘versus’ Skills Debate, Part 2: What about ‘transferable skills’?
In the first part of this post, I discussed the need to develop more broad and inclusive understandings of knowledge and to move away from unhelpfully simplistic and reductive notions like ‘study skills’ which, it is wrongly assumed, stand somehow outside the realm of what we call ‘knowledge’. Here, I want to interrogate more closely […]
Supporting student learning: the limits of genericism
‘Learning in higher education involves adapting to new ways of knowing: new ways of understanding, interpreting and organising knowledge. Academic literacy practices… constitute central processes through which students learn new subjects and develop their knowledge about new areas of study. A practices approach to literacy takes account of the cultural and contextual component of writing […]
New teaching resources to support students’ learning
We’ve recently added new resources to our learning development teaching resource page. These resources provide teachers with exercises and materials they can adapt and contextualise for their own disciplinary contexts. Current resources are organised under the three categories below. A fourth, focussing on supporting students’ presentation skills, will be added very shortly. Teaching resources to support […]
Using the different types of blog in Blackboard
Blogging is a good way to get students to engage with a topic and to collaborate with each other. Students can prepare for seminars or tutorials, allowing the teacher to move to deeper learning more quickly. Writing and critical skills can also improve. Quieter and less confident students can prepare their contributions and have their […]
Using Turnitin to teach about plagiarism
Turnitin is not just for spotting plagiarism once an assignment is uploaded. It can be used to teach students about plagiarism. You can allow students to upload a version of an assignment and generate a similarity report as many times as they like before the due date. This will give you a chance […]
Recent Comments