Category Archives: Action research ideas

Chewing over our professional standards…

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Sarah and I chose to look at the UKPSF together as it felt like a topic that would benefit from chewing over and discussing. I think it was a really useful exercise as, although we talk a lot, in this context, we had a really focussed, small amount of time to be with our thoughts, to feed of each others’ thoughts and to get to somewhere new. We didn’t rehearse of have any of the conversation beforehand so it’s interesting to me how quickly and consistently we got to somewhere new.

Areas of Activity: A3 Assess and give feedback to learners

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Core knowledge: K3 How students learn, both generally and within their subject/disciplinary area(s)

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Professional values: V1 Respect individual learners and diverse learning communities

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Take-aways:

Broadening out ways to facilitate staff development e.g. peer observation, reflection, follow ups, etc. to improve both ‘assessment’ really of the effectiveness of our provision and also the feedback (and assessment) for (mostly) staff who attend to deepen their understanding.

The role of compassionate and constructive feedback – connected to the thought above, we need to ask ourselves, how we fold this into our context given we don’t offer formal feedback and assessment.

Thinking critically about where and how we deliver training, especially for students – not online by default!

Advocacy – going to people higher up in CSM to advocate for accessibility and inclusivity. After the conversation finished, we discussed revisiting our previous plan to create an accessibility focussed group at CSM with the Exchange, Disability Services, and the Library. I wonder if we can include the Students’ Union? I’m going to follow this up…

Proactivity – going to the Programmes that we look after and auditing their Moodle pages for accessibility and making recommendations. We do currently make suggestions, and nudge course teams in this direction, but we could be more proactive in this area for sure and Sarah is making a start.

Some new online study skills!

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Trying out Padlet as tool for note-taking

As I’ve been trying to work on the PG Cert, I’ve become more and more in need of those organisational and referencing (who knew that would have become so different! – Everyone, I guess…) skills. So…

I talked to Bethany Moulange, from academic support about referencing material, especially from the internet, and she was great. She made me feel less scared by CiteThemRight, by just showing me how it works and what she uses it for. She did the same for Zotero, which I’d already installed, but felt intimidated by. I still do a bit as I can’t work out if it’s the right way for me, but I suspect it is.

One of the hardest things about this is that I suspect I might need different tools for different things and I can’t really cope with the disorganisation of that.

So… I’ve just tried OneNote, which I hoped might do a few different things. Here’s my first page:

And trying out OneNote…

I watched this video which was by Dr Paul Penn, recommended by Santanu and it confirmed what I thought really. I need something that allows me to take notes in the way that write, but online.

I’m really interested in how all this is for students and how using laptops might be removing some the benefit we could be getting from studying, by reducing the potential cognitive benefits of hand writing, whilst at the same time opening so many doors, particularly in terms of accessibility. There are so many skills you need to effectively study. I’m hoping that through two projects with our team we can look at them in more detail. One is supporting an academic colleague in a bid to do some research into effective online notation. The other is some work we’re doing on Digital Capabilities. In a recent focus group with students for this project, a student said she uses Padlet to collate her notes which made me think we should develop a bank of different methods from students themselves as part of our student-facing support.

I tried out mindmapping with Padlet for an online talk I attended last week and found it was great for incorporating all the links people sent in the Chat as well as organising my thoughts in the way I would usually on paper. I wonder if I can embed it into OneNote…?

Wow. Turns out I don’t have online study skills!

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I am noticing more and more whilst doing the PG Cert that I am lacking some key study skills. I think this is because I did my degree BEFORE THE INTERNET and because since then I have continued to rely on hand-written notes and hard copies of reading material, for the most part. This suits my learning preferences in that I like the process of writing and of annotating, and I find this helps me to process and remember what I’m reading about.

However, I’m also aware that as we receive and find information more and more online and/or in PDF format, I’m using Adobe to highlight and annotate. I’ve yet to see if this actually works for me when I come to write something and actively use the research. I’m also naturally quite organised in my storing of materials and bookmarking things, but I feel I haven’t done this sufficiently with reading material, or I haven’t considered carefully enough what I might need, so the storage and impending disorganisation is starting to make me feel anxious.

What I realise is (embarrassingly), that despite working in digital learning, I am sadly lacking in independent online study skills. I need some apps for annotating documents, I need to apply my organisational skills to my reading and I also need to work out a way of taking notes, ideas, quotes from various sources without printing out lots of paper, or being tied to more real-life notebooks.

I think part of the problem is that my research skills are also pre-internet. I’m used to looking in the library for the key texts, or journal entries. I haven’t worked out a good way either to find and access the texts that I need or process them through reading and making notes, ‘annotating’, or store them. I have the double-whammy of being antiquated in my experience and yet very post-internet in my expectation that I’ll be able to find what I want, when I want it.

Whilst I’m a bit embarrassed to realise this is the case, I’m also interested that it may give me an insight into student experience at UAL who maybe face similar problems, either being in a similar position to me, or just being younger and having fewer educational experiences to draw on. In my experience supporting students, I find that although they are sometimes very savvy with certain things online, online study and organisational skills don’t tend to feature much.

It makes me see that there is an important world of online study that I haven’t really looked at before. I was aware of it, but I just didn’t really think about why it would be important. I wonder how relevant it is for students at UAL, particularly given the practical nature of a lot of courses. Maybe it contributes to some of the problems students have with more traditional, essay-based units. Certainly I think it’s something we should consider when we are looking at developing digital capability. Prior to this, I was imagining the study skills element in a more limited way, focussing on using Office to store documents, images, etc., rather than more active study. Time to think again.

What am I going to do?

  • Talk to my Academic Support colleagues and find out what I can do for myself and also hear if students experience similar issues.
  • Explore Zotero which I’ve just downloaded from self service.
  • Think about how to link quotes, ideas and excerpts from different sources in one online space. This could just be a Word document of course, but I feel it would be good, with only one screen, to find a smoother solution.
  • Research other online study solutions – look online and ask my DL colleagues!
  • Maybe OneNote would be good for this – I’ve only considered it before as a teaching aid, but perhaps that would work.

See this post for an update – Some new online study skills!

13/1/23 Week 1: Introductory presentations

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I wish I’d written this straight after the session on Friday as I had more momentum then, but I’m still keen. I really enjoyed the session on Friday. I found the introductions and the research people chose opened up lots of doors in my mind, and I also enjoyed the delivery of the session, with several different interaction patterns. Also, in the breakout rooms, people were willing to chat, even though it was a bit awkward and first time-ish.

One of the big things that came out of it for me, was the conversation about play in learning. I went into the room both feeling that I had a lot of experience of using play in learning through my ESOL background, and also that I had deliberately chosen a room that was a bit more challenging for me. I’m not sure why I had these conflicting thoughts, but maybe because I’m aware that in an art and design and HE context, play often means something quite different from what I imagine. Anyway, I started the conversation and mentioned that I feel I’ve possibly become a bit stale or a bit cautious in the way I approach teaching since I came into HE. This is because I’m almost entirely staff facing now and I’m afraid of people feeling they’ve wasted time, or even (more recently) in case they don’t talk. I used to very explicitly feel that this was something that you just had to risk, but I realise now I’ve become cautious. I also feel there are things which are just not acceptable in HE, certain apps, fun things, which feel out of place. I don’t know if they actually are or not.

I came out of the session feeling excited about a new idea for my action research project. I thought I could test out play as a means of learning about digital platforms. It seems to fit into my belief in student-centred and active learning, and at the same time push me out of my comfort zone. Kind of the same contradiction I had when I went into the room – both comfortable and uncomfortable.

The other people in the room were interesting in their approach to play; some talked about gaming, others about students bringing games themselves, others talked about things I’m very familiar with e.g. Find someone who…. I wish I had written more notes now but I was enjoying just listening. Some of the things I wrote down about the play format were: legitimises experimentation, fast-paced activities, helps with empathy, helps build trust, fostering a safer learning environment. We also talked about play without specific learning objectives – this is the key thing I think. It’s quite easy to set up a ‘play’ scenario which takes learners through play like activities (quizzes, matching activities, etc) which are designed to teach certain skills. However, keeping that really open, so participants really can play, but also feel purpose, is much more challenging. Generating a sense of purpose, without an underlying learning objective. Or perhaps without an obvious one? I’m not sure I’m immediately reverting to my safe space of having a clear objective, even if it’s not explicit. Hmm..