tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7436164989365540072024-03-05T00:38:33.415-08:00Educational Reflectionsthe occasional thoughts of an educational designerDeborah Venesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15433545287538459952noreply@blogger.comBlogger45125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-743616498936554007.post-80341744322081261602014-05-17T16:41:00.000-07:002014-05-18T19:37:15.603-07:00Conversation Piece<!--[if gte mso 9]>
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{mso-style-name:"Table Deborah Venesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15433545287538459952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-743616498936554007.post-32972937829094646562013-06-03T19:11:00.001-07:002013-06-03T19:11:59.308-07:00Students reflecting on research-led teachingToday I attended a colloquium organized by the ANU Centre for Teaching and Learning where some of the most interesting presentations were from students working as tutors and students trying to figure out how to be better discipline experts. One of the best of these presentations was from a student of mathematics who has been thinking and writing about "mathematical skills, thought processes and Deborah Venesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15433545287538459952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-743616498936554007.post-26914315677413287012013-04-15T21:37:00.001-07:002013-04-15T21:37:37.015-07:00Why do we need universities?Last weekend, the federal government announced plans to slash $2.3 billion from its spending on higher education in order to fund the Gonski school reforms, the biggest cut to the sector since John Howard's 1996 budget. The short-sightedness of this decision leaves me in despair.
I've taken advantage of my democratic right to express my opinion and have written to the Prime Minister Deborah Venesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15433545287538459952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-743616498936554007.post-68059761490205082642013-01-22T14:47:00.001-08:002013-01-22T14:47:15.092-08:002013: starting outIn Australian universities, for the educational design and development community, January is the month of reflection. Our academic colleagues aren't usually back on campus, and we get to spend some time planning for the rest of the year. This year is going to be busy for me and my colleagues - but that makes it no different from all the other years I've worked in universities.
Among other thingsDeborah Venesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15433545287538459952noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-743616498936554007.post-59699494382004267522012-10-01T20:59:00.001-07:002012-10-02T18:50:41.572-07:00MOOCs: the next Big Thing? or What about the teachers?
Ahh, yes … the next Big Thing.
Let’s have a definition first. According to Wikipedia (today at least), a MOOC – a massive open online course – is “a type of online course aimed at large-scale participation and open access via the web”, a recent development in the area of distance education, and a progression of the kind of open education ideals suggested by open educational resources. TypicallyDeborah Venesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15433545287538459952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-743616498936554007.post-18561211263978273402012-08-05T17:55:00.001-07:002012-08-05T17:55:21.227-07:00Pondering things technologicalWhen I was a very young teacher in training, I was strongly influenced by the work of the Canadian Marshall McLuhan and by Neil Postman’s book Teaching as a subversive activity. I’ve been prompted to buy Postman’s book again. This time, it will be delivered instantaneously to my e-book reader, which is perhaps ironic, given Postman’s warnings that contemporary mass communications media make it Deborah Venesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15433545287538459952noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-743616498936554007.post-58894278800726951972012-03-29T16:31:00.002-07:002012-03-29T16:31:39.887-07:00My Other blogIn my last posting, I invited you to subscribe to a Moodle site I had set up, called Teaching Techniques. This site was to be a password-protected site where I collected ideas about teaching strategies and techniques, tailored for those teaching face-to-face and online in universities and other tertiary institutions. I had made a good start, with 16-17 good ideas for content-independent Deborah Venesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15433545287538459952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-743616498936554007.post-11868591316439420722012-02-16T21:48:00.000-08:002012-02-16T21:59:03.628-08:00Building the Teaching Techniques siteI’ve been having great fun this week, in between doing the tasks associated with my day job. I’ve been building a password-protected website (a Moodle site hosted by the excellent company NetSpot) where I’ve started to gather together an annotated list of the skills that might be selected to go into the kitbag of a very good teacher. Some of them are obvious – questioning technique, for example; Deborah Venesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15433545287538459952noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-743616498936554007.post-8544342825139372942012-01-23T21:14:00.000-08:002012-01-23T21:14:44.648-08:00Augmented Reality and my friend MattToday I had lunch with a friend, who is working on an amazing project with the InSPIRE Centre at the University of Canberra. Matt Bacon is working on a project to investigate the educational value of augmented reality (a-r) technologies with a group of equally talented people - Robert Fitzgerald, Anna Wilson, and Danny Munnerly. Wow.
He's already planted an a-r forest Deborah Venesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15433545287538459952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-743616498936554007.post-65936752643606438642012-01-02T16:41:00.000-08:002012-01-02T16:41:42.271-08:00The scholarship of teaching (as research)I've long admired Rick Reis's newsletter from Stanford, Tomorrow's Professor. He is alert to important trends, drawing our attention to and providing brief but powerful analyses of key issues. His recent post on "the scholarship of teaching and learning as 'research' " is no different. This issue has been of concern to academic and educational developers for some time, and it is good to see the Deborah Venesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15433545287538459952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-743616498936554007.post-57105560507636746872011-12-19T18:53:00.000-08:002011-12-19T18:53:05.324-08:00Reflections on ASCILITE 2011 Hobart
Hobart from Mt Wellington
This year’s ASCILITE conference in Hobart was very well attended, with nearly 500 participants from 90+ institutions. I certainly took away at least two new ideas and several other things to think about.
The keynote speakers were:
• Gilly Salmon, who reprised her books on “e-moderating”
• Simon Buckingham Shum, who delivered an extremely Deborah Venesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15433545287538459952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-743616498936554007.post-75614304476327243792011-12-15T22:14:00.000-08:002011-12-19T04:38:36.843-08:00Teaching the language of the disciplinesEarlier this week, I attended the launch of a book. The people around me are constantly publishing monographs and scholarly articles. Some of them are good, some of them are mind-boggling boring (to me ... not to everyone). Some of them deal with narrow academic studies, some are the result of years of focused attention on a PhD topic, and some of them emerge from wide, cross-disciplinary Deborah Venesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15433545287538459952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-743616498936554007.post-14754494074813365682011-11-29T19:01:00.000-08:002011-11-29T19:01:54.010-08:00Pessimist or realist?Maybe it's just because it's the festive season, and maybe there's a change in the air, but this week I have come across two articles dealing with similar issues - one serious, one very silly. Both gave me comfort.
I have long lamented the tendency among those of my tribe who proselytize, touting the bright-shiny things in a firm belief, unquestioned and unqualified, that more Deborah Venesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15433545287538459952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-743616498936554007.post-89311781395720168212011-11-27T17:54:00.000-08:002011-11-27T17:54:11.613-08:00As 2011 comes to a closeWell, here I am at the end of November, and I really don't know where the second half of this year went. Still, the year has gone well. Back on the home farm (in the university that buys most of my time), we've made some useful progress, tidying up our curriculum documentation and spreading ideas of clear learning outcomes and alignment with assessment. Some of my academic colleagues have Deborah Venesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15433545287538459952noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-743616498936554007.post-13231274290850240552011-09-29T19:04:00.000-07:002011-09-29T19:04:38.527-07:00A new project<!--[if gte mso 9]> Normal.dotm 0 0 1 240 1368 The Australian National University 11 2 1680 12.0 <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]> 0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]> <![endif]--> <!--[if gte mso 10]>
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{mso-style-name:"Table Deborah Venesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15433545287538459952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-743616498936554007.post-41354679629226611542011-07-21T19:17:00.000-07:002011-07-21T21:12:30.500-07:00Turnitin and cheats: what one lecturer did at the Stern School of Business of New York UniversityStephen Downes wrote today about one lecturer's experience with plagiarism detection software.
The link, to a blog posting by Panos Ipeirotis, may not work because he has been asked to remove the entry by his employer for legal reasons. However, even if you can't get to his original posting, read the comments from others about his posting (on his blog). Also of interest are the remarksDeborah Venesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15433545287538459952noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-743616498936554007.post-83296153204899525822011-07-17T17:45:00.000-07:002011-07-18T18:20:17.825-07:00Thwarting the Shadow ScholarMany of the academics I work with are very concerned about issues of plagiarism and academic dishonesty amongst their students. Many of their students speak English as a second or foreign language. These international students often struggle with everyday conversational interaction, let alone the difficulties associated with studying at a tertiary level in a borrowed language. The standard of Deborah Venesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15433545287538459952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-743616498936554007.post-87249024092337007622011-07-10T18:41:00.000-07:002011-07-10T18:42:41.523-07:00Digital Natives or Digital Learners?One of my favourite Net Gen Skeptic bloggers, Mark Bullen, has been in Lisbon at the 2011 ED-MEDIA conference. He has reported on some of the papers that support his view that takeup of digital technologies is not generational, but criticized the authors for using Prensky's terminology. Among the papers he references is one from the excellent team at Wollongong (this one authored by Deborah Venesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15433545287538459952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-743616498936554007.post-30889126322660582572011-07-07T22:19:00.000-07:002011-07-12T05:12:14.659-07:00Why writing good learning outcomes isn't rocket scienceI was recently asked to put together a one-page cheat sheet for highly intelligent university lecturers unused to writing learning outcomes for university courses (subjects). Here's what I wrote.
Guidelines for those writing learning outcomes
Principles
1. The assessment strategy for a course is designed to provide evidence of how well students have achieved the learning outcomes.
2. Deborah Venesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15433545287538459952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-743616498936554007.post-49898536181407533282011-04-15T16:52:00.000-07:002011-04-15T16:52:22.227-07:00Conversations about technology in teaching<!--StartFragment-->
Many of the learning support people and technologists I work with are highly knowledgeable about the use of technology in education. They are amazed at the possibilities and very keen to share their interests. I learn from them all the time and I am inspired by their passion and enthusiasm – but they drive me nuts, too.
They know that our students all have multiple devicesDeborah Venesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15433545287538459952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-743616498936554007.post-15437181577366743822011-04-03T19:50:00.000-07:002011-04-03T19:51:25.719-07:00My preoccupation this week: academic standardsI've been spending a lot of time thinking about the new Australian Academic Standards Statement for Accounting (AAS-Accounting) recently ... not something that will interest as many people, I suspect. I haven't quite worked out the purpose of this document. How will individual academics use it? How will it be used by the various quality assurance agencies and mechanisms in place in the Deborah Venesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15433545287538459952noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-743616498936554007.post-12826468310959622072011-03-09T20:20:00.000-08:002011-03-09T20:20:58.623-08:00The Net Gen Skeptic blogMark Bullen, who writes the Net Gen Skeptic blog, has found two more articles supporting his thesis that there is no such thing as the "net gen".
The blog was set up to "... provide a balanced exploration of research and commentary on the impact of digital technologies on higher education. This blog is part of the research project, Digital Learners in Higher Education: Implications for Deborah Venesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15433545287538459952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-743616498936554007.post-52225372354841342672010-12-15T14:46:00.000-08:002010-12-15T14:46:32.657-08:007 types of learning spacesGenerally I try not to post links without some useful additional comment. However, I've run out of year so am scrambling to get everything out of the way before Christmas, and I think that Ewan McIntosh's short presentation (Learning spaces. Virtual spaces. Physical spaces.) is worth a bare link. I've been following his blog for several months, and he has interesting things to say. In fact, Deborah Venesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15433545287538459952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-743616498936554007.post-91154543731365936842010-12-13T13:30:00.000-08:002010-12-13T13:30:37.902-08:00Discover something surprising about yourself and the WebI have a serious post (and some final reflections on ASCILITE) bubbling away, but in the meantime, here's something just for fun: http://www.veryshortlist.com/vsl/daily.cfm/review/1741/Web_video//?tp.Deborah Venesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15433545287538459952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-743616498936554007.post-88093564158480888282010-12-06T23:01:00.000-08:002010-12-13T20:27:51.570-08:00Day 2 of ASCILITE 2010The plenary speakers this morning included Lev Gonick from Cleveland - talking about a massive project to link up hundreds of citizens via fibre optic broadband and provide them with ongoing health monitoring ... among other things. Bit too Big Brother-ish for my liking. Tom Reeves was very funny, provocative, and quite charming. He recommended some books that will go on the library order, Deborah Venesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15433545287538459952noreply@blogger.com0