vetpad

Telling stories: “Tangled webs and learning blogs”

Excellent talk by Julie Hughes – CELT / School of Eduation UoW – a passionate eportfolio teacher for the past two years researching the use of ePortfolios for teaching, learning and assessment to support reflective learning and development. Educational theory: Learning situated in landscape / social context (Lave & Wenger 1991); Belonging and identity important and dialogue is key in creating meaningful reflection (Brookfield, Bolton, Gagne). University needs to adapt not students. Risk taking essential. Process rather than product.

Creating a PGCE learning space

Stressed the importance of putting work in at the beginning to create a warm, supportive, collaborative space (use texting metaphors eg smileys). Learners have the freedom to set up their own shared areas and for some this was the “turning point” from “why bother” to “this is cool”

Metaphors and pictures

• All students are asked to create a metaphor – an image to illustrate what (learning) is like
• Comment on it
• share it to allow others to comment on it

Group size appears to be critical in this environment – small groups (?6-8), everyone knows each other and notices if someone is not contributing – they may comment on this in the discussion to try and encourage participation.

Here’s a Word doc written by the Julie and the students (28kb)

Another excellent Slice of Life conference – this year in Lausanne, Switzerland. I was first on after the keynote with “Building the perfect Medic or Veterinarian: From Directed Learning to Independent Learners?” (although until 30 seconds before it looked like I was giving the keynote as Kazem had not arrived – train problems in Switzerland?!) – programme is here [requires IE] and the sessions were all recorded so the audio/video should appear at some point. A pdf version of my slides is also available.

Essentially my paper was about how medical and veterinary students are approaching their studying and how the perception of the curriculum affects their approach. I gave some initial tentative analysis of data collected from the “Approaches and Study Skills Inventory for Students: ASSIST” questionnaire (developed by Noel Entwistle’s group at Edinburgh University) which seemed to be suggesting that students were more comfortable with surface approaches to learning.

Gerald Grow’s paper “Teaching learners to be self-directed” 1991 on matching the learner’s stageof self-direction with the teaching style also seemed relevant. He states several assumptions that he is aware of holding including:

The goal of the educational process is to produce self-directed, lifelong learners. Many current educational practices in public schools and universities, however, do more to perpetuate dependency that to create self-direction.

Just as dependency and helplessness can be learned, self-direction can be learned – and it can be taught.

Also worth a look at the “Concepts and Conceptual Frameworks Underpinning the ETL Project“ document [185kb] by Noel Entwistle as it talks about the influences on student learning.