Playful and Creative Learning

#Take5 #90 Reflecting through art, culture and practice

Published: 29/06/2023 - Reading Time: 27 min

Categories: Playful and Creative Learning | Take5

This #Take5 is brought to you from Simone Maier. Simone is an inspirational lecturer in the LondonMet School of AAD – art, architecture and design – and is soon to complete an MA in Art Education, Culture and Practice at the Institute of Education (IoE).  Working with Simone, we became fascinated by the concept of practice-based research – where the practitioner makes something – anything – as a way of exploring or researching their own theory and practice. This, we thought, was something that every practitioner – every educationist – should think about and get involved with.  Read on and […]

Used brushes on an artist's palette of colorful oil paint for drawing and painting

Take5 #87 Towards a more creative and playful HE

Published: 18/05/2023 - Reading Time: 16 min

Categories: Playful and Creative Learning | Take5

Play provides the energy, the eruptions, the poetry and the connectivity for engagement and success. Play transforms deficit-fixing teaching, it is creative and emergent, it provides spaces and places of reimagining and agency – play has the power to transform education, and educational experiences and outcomes (Sinfield et al., 2019). This #Take5 is brought to you from Sandra Sinfield (London Metropolitan University), Tom Burns (London Metropolitan University) and Sandra Abegglen (University of Calgary). Drawing together playful, arts-based and creative practices, this post offers theoretical arguments for why we all need a more creative Higher Education (HE) to build a more […]

Representation of HE 2 1

#Take5 #86 Taking Positive Steps for Learning and Teaching: Movement for Learner Developers.

Published: 04/05/2023 - Reading Time: 12 min

Categories: Research | Playful and Creative Learning | Take5 | Wellbeing

This #Take5 is brought to you from Lisa Clughen, Nottingham Trent University. It is both about the importance of movement in HE – and an invitation to participate in a small research project focussing on qigong-based mindful movement in HE. #Take5 steps? Taking Positive Steps in Learning and Teaching: An Invitation to Participate in Mindful Movement Research. Image: Lisa Clughen doing some Mindful Movement at the Lourve-Lens, France If you could do a very short activity during your working day that, research suggests, could reap wide-ranging rewards for your physical, cognitive and mental health and wellbeing, and in fact for […]

Lisa Clughen doing some Mindful Movement at the Lourve-Lens, France

#Take5 #82 What does AI mean for Learning Development?

Published: 16/03/2023 - Reading Time: 20 min

Categories: Education | Digital Literacy | Peer Assisted Learning and Mentoring | Playful and Creative Learning | Research | Research Methodologies and Data Collection | Study Skills | Take5 | Technology Enhanced Learning

This #Take5 is brought to you from our very own Lee Fallin. Lee has been exploring and playing with this AI technology for some time now – and we asked him to share his insights with the wider LD community. So – read on – and let us all join the conversation about what these revolutionary techs mean for our students and for us.  If it’s all about the ChatBots: What about Learning Development? This blog post will muse on the ‘rise of AI’ and what this means for Learning Development. I am not an expert, but I have spent much […]

Robot eating a donut in space

#Take5 #79 Bricks behind bars: lessons from LEGO® Serious Play® workshops in prison

Published: 03/01/2023 - Reading Time: 12 min

Categories: Widening Participation | Digital Literacy | Inclusivity and Differentiation | Playful and Creative Learning | Study Skills | Take5 | Technology Enhanced Learning

This #Take5 is brought to you from Julia Reeve – and it is a beautifully detailed and thoughtful look at  LEGO® Serious Play®. Julia Reeve is a National Teaching Fellow based in Leicester who works in diverse educational settings including Further, Higher, prison and community education. Her practice focuses on building confidence, connection and creative thinking via imaginative, multisensory learning. If you’ve never attended a LEGO® Serious Play® session yourself – please, please read on.   Setting the scene My name is Julia Reeve, I’m an educational consultant and part-time lecturer in the Faculty of Business & Law at De Montfort University, Leicester. I’m […]

Prison learner model: ‘Positive steps’

#Take5 #73 Teaching research skills – my epic adventure…

Published: 01/07/2022 - Reading Time: 5 min

Categories: Playful and Creative Learning | Academic Literacy | Digital Literacy | Learning Spaces and Learning Communities | Research Methodologies and Data Collection | Study Skills | Take5 | Technology Enhanced Learning

This month’s #Take5 is brought to you from Daisy Abbott an interdisciplinary researcher and research developer based in the School of Simulation and Visualisation at The Glasgow School of Art. Daisy experiments with game-based learning – and has created a novel approach to teaching research skills. Research: Mapping and Pathfinding My name is Daisy Abbott, I’m a researcher in game-based learning and teacher of postgraduates at the School of Simulation and Visualisation at The Glasgow School of Art. Join me on my quest to navigate the dangerous lands of teaching Research Skills… Keywords: Research skills, academic skills, higher order thinking skills, […]

Daisy Abbott

“That was a pretty serious jump”: Feelings of ambivalence and complexity of arts-based educators in online environments  

Published: 26/05/2022 - Reading Time: 7 min

Categories: Playful and Creative Learning | Research

By Dr Selen Kars-Unluoglu (University of the West of England) & Prof Burcu Guneri-Cangarli (Izmir University of Economics) Arts-based methods which traditionally rely on engagement with material artefacts (e.g. LEGO® bricks, finger puppets, craft materials) have been on the rise in management learning and teaching (Taylor and Ladkin, 2009). COVID-19 has challenged educators to adapt these methods to online teaching environments. The challenge was to get learners to move from thinking to thinging (Knappett & Malafouris, 2008)in online environments without the opportunity to pass on, share, co-engage with material artefacts in a physical setting. While there has been some discussion […]

White wooden door in a stone wall

#Take5 #61 Breaking the Zoom gloom for students: hi-tech to lo-tech solution

Published: 25/06/2021 - Reading Time: 13 min

Categories: Technology Enhanced Learning | Playful and Creative Learning | Take5

This #Take5 post is brought to you from Debbie Holley and Heidi Singleton, Bournemouth University, UK – who also delivered this as an engaging LD@3. Challenge that ‘Zoom Gloom!’ (Wiederhold 2020) Learners describe their ‘best learning moment’ as a ‘flow’ – a point of psychological deep involvement of immersion in an activity or a task, which results in deep learning and high levels of satisfaction (OU Innovating Pedagogy Report 2021). The Learning Development community are experts at creating these types of activities (see the amazing LearnHigher site); this post explores how we can further enhance our student offering through considering extending learning opportunities through simulations. Students report […]

Virtual Reality vs Augmented Reality

LD@3 Essay Writing Activity Cards for Creative Disciplines

Published: 09/06/2021 - Reading Time: 2 min

Categories: Playful and Creative Learning | Events | Study Skills

Session abstract:  The Study Skills team at Arts University Bournemouth (AUB) in collaboration with a Graphic Design staff and students have developed a set of activity cards to help scaffold students’ essay writing from planning through to editing. These are evidence-based activities drawn from in-course subject-specific and open, cross-disciplinary workshops undertaken at AUB and are translated into principles-based activities. They are designed to provide frameworks for academic research, writing and style based specifically in creative disciplines. Students work in pairs or small groups by following a set of prompts within a selected stage of the writing process. The activity cards […]

Illustration of a person writing an essay

#Take5 #57 Using the jigsaw technique for collaborative online learning

Published: 12/03/2021 - Reading Time: 5 min

Categories: Playful and Creative Learning | Study Skills | Take5 | Technology Enhanced Learning

Puzzling the pieces This #Take5 is brought to you from Katharine Stapleford who has solved this year’s Covid-19 problem – how to get students working (and reading) collaboratively when studying online and at a distance. Here’s Katharine: Background I teach on the MA Digital Education programme at Leeds University. The programme is 100% online distance learning and recruits students from all over the world. The programme adopts a flipped learning* design, whereby each weekly unit centres around an interactive student-led synchronous seminar with some asynchronous pre- and post-seminar tasks. Why the jigsaw technique? The underlying principle of the jigsaw technique, […]

jigsaw puzzle illustration with four characters carrying the jigsaw
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