vetpad

Great presentation by James Farmer at education.au exploring how eLearning environments (from Computer labs to threaded discussions and MCQ quizzes to VLEs such as Blackboard) are tending to encourage teachers to perpetuate a transmissive model of education and how we might foster engagement and empowerment in teachers and learners using a blogging environment instead. He refers to the “Community of Inquiry Model” (Rourke et al 2001) that stresses the importance of social, cognitive and teaching presence in any effective learning encounter.

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)

I was supposed to be at a workshop in Leicester yesterday – the first meeting of a project that we are involved with (IMPALA) set up to explore educational uses of podcasting. However I spent 6 hours in the casualty department of our local hospital instead - my wife was rushed there by me with a suspected appendicitis. Anyway, she is now fine and that’s the main thing.

Reflecting on the event, reminds me of the patient experiences website that we recommended to medical students where I was working previously – and how story telling can be a powerful learning experience for students. The medical student who saw us first in casualty was clearly not aware that extreme pain requires acknowledgement and a rapid response and that lengthy interviews about your past medical history did not work well in this situation. The fact that history taking skills would have been just as effectively practiced after the morphine injection was missed somehow. This student could actually have helped to keep us informed of what was going on and built up a better relationship with us and probably learnt a lot more….

For me the most important skill demonstrated by any member of staff (one of the nurses) during that stressful time was COMMUNICATION with a little EMPATHY - the simple phrase “you are obviously in a lot of pain – we are going to give you something to ease the pain now” made a big difference to how we felt.