Write a brief summary of any work-related activities undertaken on 15th June 2011 and/or your nearest working day . In posting your reply, you consent to the potential use of anonymised extracts from this material in resources that may in future be published by the Association for Learning Development in Higher Education (ALDinHE), for educational and professional development purposes only.
Sandra Sinfield
Either this is a really busy time – hence the relatively few responses so far (and the really, really late ones, like mine) or we’ve all collapsed under the strain…
The 15th was a busy day: edited a paper submitted for inclusion in our in-house journal, Investigations in Teaching and Learning. A definite sense of urgency about the task because we want an edition of Investigations ready for the L&T Conference on the 28th June.
Reviewed again our Staff Guide: ‘Teaching for Student Engagement’. We will be using this in a range of staff-facing sessions in the Faculties in June/July and again in August.
Contacted students who had agreed to present at our L&T Conference. The theme is Engaging our Diverse Students – so we are having a Panel of students at the beginning of the day talking about their engaging experiences. This is quite a terrifying task for students, so we are recruiting more than we think we need… which is lucky, because they are dropping out as fast as we are recruiting them. We plan to conclude the day with a performance of some sort by students also – and I am trying to get some Events Management students to organise the last part of the day. (NB: Obviously I am now writing this post-conference and I can report that all the student segments were brilliant: full of energy, creativity and positivism. They were very well received with many people saying they were the best part of the day. I am now in a good position to push to regain our student-facing conference – and that it can be run annually by Events Management students as part of their assessment.)
I know that I was also engaged in email and admin – it was a busy day in a busy week… but I’ve forgotten the rest…
Spent the whole day (~16hrs) writing/completing an EdD assignment on Professional learning
Chris Doye
A landmark day – at least, hopefully, a small landmark – in terms of the way in which Student Study Support is perceived within the university: I gave a short presentation at the Arts and Humanities Faculty’s ‘Sharing Good Practice’ conference in conjunction with a member of the academic staff (on a wiki writing project I had supported him in doing with his students). Why did this seem so momentous? Because at our uni study support has historically been student-facing, seen as largely bolt-on and remedial by many academic staff, while the learning development side of things is the province of the learning technologists, who are in a completely different department. It has been one of Study Support’s goals to work more closely with the learning techmologists and academics to embed what we do so it was great that we’ve been able to take a real – and visible – step towards it.
paulineridley
To work early to finish preparing workshop for the disability and dyslexia team annual conference. I’d been asked to offer an academic staff perspective on recommendations for reasonable adjustments but shifted the focus slightly to explore how we can improve communication and collaboration between learning support tutors and course teams. Talked a bit about aldinhe and how LD staff have similar issues and also about learnhigher projects to extend the use of visual learning approaches and ‘alternative’ assessments for all students not just those with dyslexia.. Ran it twice during the day and lots of interesting if not surprising stuff came up including need for all course tutors to write clearer assignment briefs and fact that many learning support don’t have Uni logins to access their students course areas on the vle. This would be such an easy thing to fix and would enable them to check requirements. I briefly referred to terry finnigan et al’s work on how LD staff are perceived and perceive themselves (mrs mop etc) and they really liked that so it would be nice to do a followup. Gave out lots of copies of the drawing to learn books and went to a couple of interesting sessions about dyslexia..
Carina Buckley
On Wednesday I started the day with a library training session – a 30 minute slot for updating and disseminating information on resources and so on. I don’t usually go to these, as I’m not a librarian, but there was tea and biscuits and one of the five minute talks was on CPD (http://cpd23.blogspot.com/) and that sounded interesting. And it was!
The rest of the day was spent writing my end of year report. I pulled together details of how many appointments I’d had with students (over 700), how many hours I’d spent with them and what kind of queries they’d come with, amongst other things. While I think this was a good thing to do anyway, it has the bonus of showing how well used I am, and is beginning to make a case for expanding my tiny department. I sent that off, very satisfied, to my line manager at 5.30 and then went to watch the new X-Men film. All in all a good day!
Terry Finnigan
Yesterday I delivered a staff development session in the morning around induction activities to a course team. It went really well
In the afternoon I was in the FE forum meeting and then on to a leaving do for an old colleague.There seem to be lots of those at the moment
In the evening I had to work on revising an abstract for a conference in July- I hope It will now be accepted- I didn’t finish it till about 1am so I am very tired today!