Thursday 4 February 2010

Off to Wales


I was invited to present some work on Blended Learning (which included assessment activity) to Glamorgan University. Rather than just present ‘stuff’ I tried to engage those that gave up their lunchtime by asking them to consider their own challenges and also ask what they thought supports learning. Clearly, technology enhanced learning is about learning, not technology, and so I wanted to help surface their own values and pedagogic perspectives. I presented the UH context and gave some examples of Blended Learning in practice.

Following the session I was whisked away to share some of our ESCAPE activity. Glamorgan have a Change Academy project which focuses on assessment . I tried to outline some of the ways in which we (the ESCAPE team)( were working and also highlight some of things worth considering.

I tried to emphasise

* That whilst assessment was the focus of our attention, our project was about change management too.

* the importance of, and benefits to be gained, by considering an Appreciative Inquiry approach to evaluation

* The importance of trying to understand the culture and constraints and of the Schools we were working with

* The importance of working with a principled approach to curriculum design and that we (the project lead) need to bring the principles to the Schools.

* That innovation and change is stimulated by many things and that we need to be alert to the different stimuli and create situations where they can flourish

* That developing educationally effective assessments alone might not stimulate all colleagues. Many staff are experiencing numerous time pressures and so consideration of resource efficiency along with educational effectiveness is important too.

It’s a real shame that I didn’t get more / any time to hear about their work but having established contact I will follow things up to see how they are working and how we might benefit from their insights too.

4 comments:

Anne Marie Cunningham said...

Wish you had written this in advance of the meeting as I would have pushed you to try and meet up! Clever:)

Alice said...

Thanks Mark for visiting us. On hindsight, I do feel rather selfish that we were simply getting you to share with us your work and there weren't much of a chance to share our work with you. Probably poor organisation on my part! (sorry!) Maybe another visit in the future or even some sort of research together? I promise there will be welsh cakes with jam! :-)

MarkRussell said...

Hi Alice,

Joint research would be just fab - keep that in mind. Perhaps we could so an assessment-for-learning seminar at each others place - what do you think? That might help see where our ideas are converging.

Write something together too?

Let me know what opps you think might be worth exploring.

I'm sure we can catch up to hear a bit more of what you're doing.

Oh, and given that (for various reasons) I now skip exercise, I should really skip the Welsh Cakes. Although they were yum.

As ever, good to see you. Hope the session was okay. Speak soon. Mark

MarkRussell said...

Hi Anne Marie,

Oh dear, seems like I missed an opportunity to catch up in the real. Really sorry.

I'm sure there's a note-to-self somewhere.

Mark