Coaching or Mentoring, that is the question.
We are concerned in our school (Electronics and Computer Science) about the low numbers of female academics, and the apparent low progression rate from post grad, to post doc and academic.
Of course not all post grads will want to pursue an academic career, but we seem to have proportionally less females at each succesive level up the career ladder.
The University of Southampton has a number of initiatives which are specificially designed to assist/support female academics, post docs, post grads and undergraduates. See note at end of this post.
Plans are underway in ECS to introduce some life coaching for current post docs. Female post docs will all be approached directly, although the activitiy will be open to all post docs in the longer term.
Over in SES and Chemistry, there is a mentoring scheme which has just been launched. I think both approaches have particular strenghts, and will be interested to compare the two sets of activities.
WISET has already implemented action learning sets for senior female staff which has been found to be useful for those who participated, and may have contributed to a number of colleagues gaining promotions to Professorial level.
We have some fabulously high achieving women across our faculty of Engineering, Science and Mathematics. The provide wonderful role models for our female colleagues at all levels. Academic careers are highly competitive, there are some interesting issues inside the work we propose to consider to what extent the lower than normal levels of female progression is due to active choice, and to what extent it is due to structural barriers to female progression and the impact of perceptions on judgements made on both sides of the interview table.
Note:
WISET is a national organisation, and the local 'branch' is active in our faculty of Engineering Science and Mathematics. WISET's focus is predominantly on employed academic staff.
Theano is an initiative across the faculty which supports undergraduate and post graduate students.
Locally in ECS we have a group called ECS women which works to provide support specific to our school and the needs of students in our subject areas of Computer Science, Software Engineering, IT in Organisations, Web Technologies, Web Science, Electronic Engineering , Electro and Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Enginering
In ECS we also have a school diversity committee which concerns itself with all aspects of diversity amongst out staff and students.
Wednesday, 28 January 2009
Digital Native Myth or Reality?
Just yesterday I posted a Twitter reply to a friend's message stating that I thought the digital native/generation X/ Baby Boomer was an ill thought shorthand rather than anything based in reality.
Its a concept which we have touched upon in seminars in the Learning Societies Lab, especially in presentations from Dave Millard (LSL) and Linda Creanor (Caledonian Academy)
Today, I am checking out a friend's blog via Twitter, and hey ho I discover that my assertion is being to be backed up by a bit of evidence.
Better still I am going to be gathering evidence from my own institution (University of Southampton) looking at students' experiences and perceptions of technology in learning over the next few week and months for a which will contribute to a study (LLiDA) being run to follow this up.
From our perspective in Southampton, its also a follow up to the work we did on the benchmarking of eLearning. Benchmarking was interesting for a number of reasons, the data we gathered, and the methodology we used (EMM), our cohort which compared findings across the methodology, and some analysis of our perspective of a research intensive university.
So if you want to follow some of this through go take a look at the good work of folks in the Caledonian Academy and their Latest Thinking and which has a link to the paper by Anoush Margaryan and Allison Littlejohn.
Its a concept which we have touched upon in seminars in the Learning Societies Lab, especially in presentations from Dave Millard (LSL) and Linda Creanor (Caledonian Academy)
Today, I am checking out a friend's blog via Twitter, and hey ho I discover that my assertion is being to be backed up by a bit of evidence.
Better still I am going to be gathering evidence from my own institution (University of Southampton) looking at students' experiences and perceptions of technology in learning over the next few week and months for a which will contribute to a study (LLiDA) being run to follow this up.
From our perspective in Southampton, its also a follow up to the work we did on the benchmarking of eLearning. Benchmarking was interesting for a number of reasons, the data we gathered, and the methodology we used (EMM), our cohort which compared findings across the methodology, and some analysis of our perspective of a research intensive university.
So if you want to follow some of this through go take a look at the good work of folks in the Caledonian Academy and their Latest Thinking and which has a link to the paper by Anoush Margaryan and Allison Littlejohn.
Tuesday, 27 January 2009
PowerPoint is evil - alternative views
Much can be said about the way we communicate with presentation slides. PowerPoint is evil was a headline which grabbed many an imagination, and also struck a chord with the sentiments of people who had been bored to a near death experience.
Personally I am a great fan of the arguments presented by Tufts on visual communication. There are also many valuable resources and web sites which exist to advise the presenter. An instructive book which takes a theatrical perspective has been produced by Cliff Atkinsons
Beyond Bullet Points, which is available in our University Library, as well as via the usual online bookstores.
There has been some excellent work done by a consortium of US Universites who have looked at the assertion evidence approach to presentations - detailed below.
The issue is perhaps a little like driving a car. For some the instruction which is required has to be simple ones which will prevent the presentation stalling, and may even make it look like it is remotely coherent, but in the longer term you not only have to master the car, know how to drive it, but are able to ensure it stays on the road, and that you can navigate it to various destinations, always remembering that this particular car does not have the benefit of roads, signposts and certainly not motorwarys - pretty crap analogy, but it will have to do for now...
Rethinking the Design of Presentation Slides: The Assertion-Evidence Structure http://www.writing.engr.psu.edu/slides.html
Many of us ask our students (undergrad and post grad) to make presentations and are sometimes disappointed with the outcomes in terms of the content of the slides.
You may find this resource useful - developed collaboratively by a set of US universities specifically addressing the needs of engineering and scientific education. It is part of a wider set of material which also addresses technical writing.
From the web site....
" Recently, much criticism has arisen about the design of slides created with Microsoft PowerPoint. This web page challenges PowerPoint's default design of a single word or short phrase headline supported by a bullet list. Rather than subscribing to Microsoft's topic-subtopic design for slides, this web page advocates an assertion-evidence structure, which is shown in Figure 1 and which serves presentations that have the purpose of informing and persuading audiences about technical content. This structure, which features a sentence-assertion headline supported by visual evidence, is documented in Chapter 4 of The Craft of Scientific Presentations, a November 2005 article in Technical Communication, and the presentation "Rethinking the Design of Presentation Slides."
BTW I have no desire to revive the passionate debate as to the relative merits of presentation software options ;-)
Personally I am a great fan of the arguments presented by Tufts on visual communication. There are also many valuable resources and web sites which exist to advise the presenter. An instructive book which takes a theatrical perspective has been produced by Cliff Atkinsons
Beyond Bullet Points, which is available in our University Library, as well as via the usual online bookstores.
There has been some excellent work done by a consortium of US Universites who have looked at the assertion evidence approach to presentations - detailed below.
The issue is perhaps a little like driving a car. For some the instruction which is required has to be simple ones which will prevent the presentation stalling, and may even make it look like it is remotely coherent, but in the longer term you not only have to master the car, know how to drive it, but are able to ensure it stays on the road, and that you can navigate it to various destinations, always remembering that this particular car does not have the benefit of roads, signposts and certainly not motorwarys - pretty crap analogy, but it will have to do for now...
Rethinking the Design of Presentation Slides: The Assertion-Evidence Structure http://www.writing.engr.psu.edu/slides.html
Many of us ask our students (undergrad and post grad) to make presentations and are sometimes disappointed with the outcomes in terms of the content of the slides.
You may find this resource useful - developed collaboratively by a set of US universities specifically addressing the needs of engineering and scientific education. It is part of a wider set of material which also addresses technical writing.
From the web site....
" Recently, much criticism has arisen about the design of slides created with Microsoft PowerPoint. This web page challenges PowerPoint's default design of a single word or short phrase headline supported by a bullet list. Rather than subscribing to Microsoft's topic-subtopic design for slides, this web page advocates an assertion-evidence structure, which is shown in Figure 1 and which serves presentations that have the purpose of informing and persuading audiences about technical content. This structure, which features a sentence-assertion headline supported by visual evidence, is documented in Chapter 4 of The Craft of Scientific Presentations, a November 2005 article in Technical Communication, and the presentation "Rethinking the Design of Presentation Slides."
BTW I have no desire to revive the passionate debate as to the relative merits of presentation software options ;-)
Wednesday, 7 January 2009
Getting away from switches
Seminar from Paul Blenkhorn who is a visiting professor with LSL in ECS at Southampton got me doing a little thinking...
Titled "Getting away from switches" it included discussion of previous interfaces - now discontinued. Paul is working in conjunction with a Japanese University and various specialist hospitals who support people with physical disabilities.
The solutions offered are software virtual keyboards with a range of interface options. Be provided various example of how you select characters move around screen with switches by
The interfaces are to some extent user defined, but there is also constraint of affordance from the input devices. It seemed quite timely in the light of the onion video of the 'new' apple keyboardless computer ;-)
One option which Paul was giving the thumbs up was a Mouse wheel which can select column on keyboard then traverse individual keys. This was a bit like the jog wheel which Sony introduced a few years ago. This example moved away from pixel control, rather taking a functional cut on the screen, with the mouse wheel successively accessing usable areas of the the screen real estate
Another option he was very keen on was a ten key mouse, designed originally for numeric input I think.
We had a bit of discussion about the emergence of user interfaces (and their demise) and there were a few views offered on the persistence power of texting via mobile phones. People persist in using them, and they master them. My view is that the interfaces have been developed iteratively with millions of users and hours of user trials, effectively driving a rapid development cycle, spurred on by competition for market share. There was some discussion of possible artefacts in solutions and behaviours which arise from the differences between Japanese data input and english language user input.
Seems to me to be an issue about the difference between individual personalised solutions and generic solutions. There was some discussion of how user's needs might be assessed. I wonder if a recommender system might work?
Some kind of quick test and then you get served a particular interface with training, then a re-evaluation subsequently to fine tune, or recommend alternatives. There is also an issue about how long does training take.
I think that mobile phone expertise is a combination of personal muscle memory learning with intuitive design which enables the user to learn or remember how to use the system
I think it would be really interesting for Paul to do a head to head with Jon Maber. Jon has been working on his own specialist input device and it would be good to see how this is progressing. I also think that the two of them could stimulate some interesting discussion. I would also like to see some kind of symposium which brought together a range of interested parties and got some good discussion going in this area.
Titled "Getting away from switches" it included discussion of previous interfaces - now discontinued. Paul is working in conjunction with a Japanese University and various specialist hospitals who support people with physical disabilities.
The solutions offered are software virtual keyboards with a range of interface options. Be provided various example of how you select characters move around screen with switches by
The interfaces are to some extent user defined, but there is also constraint of affordance from the input devices. It seemed quite timely in the light of the onion video of the 'new' apple keyboardless computer ;-)
One option which Paul was giving the thumbs up was a Mouse wheel which can select column on keyboard then traverse individual keys. This was a bit like the jog wheel which Sony introduced a few years ago. This example moved away from pixel control, rather taking a functional cut on the screen, with the mouse wheel successively accessing usable areas of the the screen real estate
Another option he was very keen on was a ten key mouse, designed originally for numeric input I think.
We had a bit of discussion about the emergence of user interfaces (and their demise) and there were a few views offered on the persistence power of texting via mobile phones. People persist in using them, and they master them. My view is that the interfaces have been developed iteratively with millions of users and hours of user trials, effectively driving a rapid development cycle, spurred on by competition for market share. There was some discussion of possible artefacts in solutions and behaviours which arise from the differences between Japanese data input and english language user input.
Seems to me to be an issue about the difference between individual personalised solutions and generic solutions. There was some discussion of how user's needs might be assessed. I wonder if a recommender system might work?
Some kind of quick test and then you get served a particular interface with training, then a re-evaluation subsequently to fine tune, or recommend alternatives. There is also an issue about how long does training take.
I think that mobile phone expertise is a combination of personal muscle memory learning with intuitive design which enables the user to learn or remember how to use the system
I think it would be really interesting for Paul to do a head to head with Jon Maber. Jon has been working on his own specialist input device and it would be good to see how this is progressing. I also think that the two of them could stimulate some interesting discussion. I would also like to see some kind of symposium which brought together a range of interested parties and got some good discussion going in this area.
Tuesday, 16 December 2008
TEL Tales: stronger methods for understanding 2.0 Social Networks
not sure about this, but think I will be posting my TEL stuff on tell tales, and my running stuff on runningsu
wonder then what I should put on shirley knot...
just for today I think I will put tell tales here too, then maybe someone with wisdom could advise me on the best thing to do....
Towards stronger methods for understanding Social Networks - today and tomorrow
Been talking with one of my students about doing some facebook analytics as a part of a research project looking at social networking. One of the things which interests me is the appropriate research methodologies to actually get to the bottom of why and how people use these sorts of networks.
Two publications in the near past (Dec 2009) give clues to why we need to get our research methods sorted.
1) Peter Schwartz in the Huffington Post blogs on the proposed death of facebook (well I paraphrase)
2) a paper from Huberman et al on Social Networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope
so my student wants to do a bit of traversing of networks and mapping patterns of connections. and it would be good if we could identify any markers for behaviours - there have been a few posts on that stuff too - something like "ten types of twitter users" I seem to recall
And after we have collected our first set of data from the network traversal, we want to talk to different user types and get some backfill on their actual usage, motivations etc etc. The whole task would be monumental - or at least suitable for some extended study, but this is going to be short and to the point.
The issue I have with both the Schwartz blog, and Huberman et al, it that they leave dangling more questions that they actually answer.
Looking at what Schwartz offers in anecdotal evidence about user preferences, what Huberman et al suggest about evidence of real network (the little networks within networks that really matter - my phrase not theirs) reminds me that I also have anecdotal and personal ethnographic evidence of a more complex set of connections, and values.
and what I want is a method of exploring this sort of network, both by physically getting the evidence from the networks, and from identifying and gathering personal data from Representative selections of those users.
I 'know' from discussions with active users whose posts I value, that there is mileage in this area, the question for me (and my student) is how are we going to get to that precious data, and therefore, what can we do to get a bit further down the methodological minefield
wonder then what I should put on shirley knot...
just for today I think I will put tell tales here too, then maybe someone with wisdom could advise me on the best thing to do....
Towards stronger methods for understanding Social Networks - today and tomorrow
Been talking with one of my students about doing some facebook analytics as a part of a research project looking at social networking. One of the things which interests me is the appropriate research methodologies to actually get to the bottom of why and how people use these sorts of networks.
Two publications in the near past (Dec 2009) give clues to why we need to get our research methods sorted.
1) Peter Schwartz in the Huffington Post blogs on the proposed death of facebook (well I paraphrase)
2) a paper from Huberman et al on Social Networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope
so my student wants to do a bit of traversing of networks and mapping patterns of connections. and it would be good if we could identify any markers for behaviours - there have been a few posts on that stuff too - something like "ten types of twitter users" I seem to recall
And after we have collected our first set of data from the network traversal, we want to talk to different user types and get some backfill on their actual usage, motivations etc etc. The whole task would be monumental - or at least suitable for some extended study, but this is going to be short and to the point.
The issue I have with both the Schwartz blog, and Huberman et al, it that they leave dangling more questions that they actually answer.
Looking at what Schwartz offers in anecdotal evidence about user preferences, what Huberman et al suggest about evidence of real network (the little networks within networks that really matter - my phrase not theirs) reminds me that I also have anecdotal and personal ethnographic evidence of a more complex set of connections, and values.
and what I want is a method of exploring this sort of network, both by physically getting the evidence from the networks, and from identifying and gathering personal data from Representative selections of those users.
I 'know' from discussions with active users whose posts I value, that there is mileage in this area, the question for me (and my student) is how are we going to get to that precious data, and therefore, what can we do to get a bit further down the methodological minefield
Friday, 14 November 2008
L-TAGS
Learners and Technology Affordances Group
I really like the perspective of technology affordances and always go back to Gaver’s paper to remind myself where the technology part of the affordances discussion originally came from.
So wayback I was involved in a project which produced some guidance of students using technolgy in learning. What I am trying to do is revisit that work and look at it with modern eyes.
Amongst the ideas which emerged then were an activity gradient - looking at different styles of interactions. I visited each area of the gradient and came up with lots of examples for each stage in the gradient. Not sure where it is now, but I do know that I don’t throw stuff away....
Also Hugh Davis and I produced a (rather clunky) slide show which looked at a day in a life of a student - and showed a few scenarios.
What I want to do now is to make a start on re-populating the stages in the gradient and add in the applications which have emerged since the work we originally did. I am planning to start by populating it myself, but then putting it up onto a wiki and getting people in workshops to elaborate it with me.
Since then too, I have got very much into the ideas of disciplinary differences and have been looking at how teaching and student learning varies across disciplines - and given my home area, of course I have quite a lot of stuff on Computer Science, engineering, technology and cognated disciplines.
These ideas link to work which we are doing on student experience following on from our campus benchmarking exercise in 2007-08. I took these ideas to COOP 2008 and they also link in to the proposal I have just put forward to the ALT2009 Programme Committee to run a student YouTube competition for short videos on the theme of their perceptions of learning.
I guess part of the idea for a YouTube competition came from the Guardian who are running something on this theme with a deadline for December 2008. Its also inspired by some of the whacky videos which our own students via the Student Union at Southampton have produced recently.
Maybe we could put a video-booth on campus which students could use, maybe we should involve the students union who ran the freshers TV stuff. Dave Tarrant is our ECS TV PhD person who may be worth talking to, Jason Allen is an undergrad in ECS who has done Freshers TV.
Not sure how this would work, but if could be an adjunct to the student voices work we are just getting off the ground.
I really like the perspective of technology affordances and always go back to Gaver’s paper to remind myself where the technology part of the affordances discussion originally came from.
So wayback I was involved in a project which produced some guidance of students using technolgy in learning. What I am trying to do is revisit that work and look at it with modern eyes.
Amongst the ideas which emerged then were an activity gradient - looking at different styles of interactions. I visited each area of the gradient and came up with lots of examples for each stage in the gradient. Not sure where it is now, but I do know that I don’t throw stuff away....
Also Hugh Davis and I produced a (rather clunky) slide show which looked at a day in a life of a student - and showed a few scenarios.
What I want to do now is to make a start on re-populating the stages in the gradient and add in the applications which have emerged since the work we originally did. I am planning to start by populating it myself, but then putting it up onto a wiki and getting people in workshops to elaborate it with me.
Since then too, I have got very much into the ideas of disciplinary differences and have been looking at how teaching and student learning varies across disciplines - and given my home area, of course I have quite a lot of stuff on Computer Science, engineering, technology and cognated disciplines.
These ideas link to work which we are doing on student experience following on from our campus benchmarking exercise in 2007-08. I took these ideas to COOP 2008 and they also link in to the proposal I have just put forward to the ALT2009 Programme Committee to run a student YouTube competition for short videos on the theme of their perceptions of learning.
I guess part of the idea for a YouTube competition came from the Guardian who are running something on this theme with a deadline for December 2008. Its also inspired by some of the whacky videos which our own students via the Student Union at Southampton have produced recently.
Maybe we could put a video-booth on campus which students could use, maybe we should involve the students union who ran the freshers TV stuff. Dave Tarrant is our ECS TV PhD person who may be worth talking to, Jason Allen is an undergrad in ECS who has done Freshers TV.
Not sure how this would work, but if could be an adjunct to the student voices work we are just getting off the ground.
Tuesday, 4 November 2008
Back in the loop - rant
OK
back in the blogosphere, but not sure for how long
desperately grappling with my online identities
am I a runner?
am I an academic?
am I just plain eccentric?
what I do know is that I have not posted since September partly because I have been doing other things, but also partly because each time I tried to post, the text appeared in Hindi! this was not my intention, but its taken til now to spot the transliteration button at the bottom on the config page and work out that I needed to change it - not that I spent a great deal of time on it you understand, but still it was a barrier
and did I mention the really good pages from British Columbia on digital tatoos?
But coming back to the life online, there are a few ideas....
If we are talking about using technology for education, we might need to think about the realities of people's lives.
Academic researchers who live online have a world view which is shaped by their experience, but it aint the world view of joe and joanna public.
I have a list of considerations:
remember:
When I was going through my dilemma of am I a runner/academic/eccentric I was also thinking that its important that I am all of these things.
Talking to my running sisters reminds me that there are lots of people who are not online all the time, do not have routine access, and who have rather clunky models of how inter-webby thing might work. We could think of them affectionately as the world wide plebs
Plebs - definition from the free dictionary
common people, folk, folks - people in general (often used in the plural); "they're just country folk"; "folks around here drink moonshine"; "the common people determine the group character and preserve its customs from one generation to the next"
so here we are back in the life online
some of us have one, some of us don't... some of us who do, are not there all the time
and I am coming back to some old ideas - technology affordances, barriers to learning hmmm...
back in the blogosphere, but not sure for how long
desperately grappling with my online identities
am I a runner?
am I an academic?
am I just plain eccentric?
what I do know is that I have not posted since September partly because I have been doing other things, but also partly because each time I tried to post, the text appeared in Hindi! this was not my intention, but its taken til now to spot the transliteration button at the bottom on the config page and work out that I needed to change it - not that I spent a great deal of time on it you understand, but still it was a barrier
- And that is what I am interested in from a research point of view.
- I came back to this blog because I have been editing my home page, and then thinking it would be better to do this via the blog.
- And then that added another item on the todo list ( which I am currently ignoring) which is that I probably need to separate my online identities.
- And then that made me think about the fact that I maybe want to register a few more domain names
- And that reminded me that each domain will need a visual identity
- and that made me think about a life online, and the fact that I only live it a bit, because I also have a life offline....
and did I mention the really good pages from British Columbia on digital tatoos?
But coming back to the life online, there are a few ideas....
If we are talking about using technology for education, we might need to think about the realities of people's lives.
Academic researchers who live online have a world view which is shaped by their experience, but it aint the world view of joe and joanna public.
I have a list of considerations:
remember:
- your students do not have the same priorities as you do
- it might be dangerous to base our models of how students prefer to learn of the leisure habits of an indeterminate number and proportion of young people
- early adopters and early majority have a different experience/perspective to the late majority
- educators need to take charge of how they go about educating
- the bandwidth of face to face communications can be incredibly high
- its a good idea to remove the barriers to learning
- learning can only be done a bit at a time
- the magic number seven plus or minus one was a good paper, but we might be happier with even less complexity
- the map is not the teritory
- academic evangelists do not have the same perspective as neophyte learner
When I was going through my dilemma of am I a runner/academic/eccentric I was also thinking that its important that I am all of these things.
Talking to my running sisters reminds me that there are lots of people who are not online all the time, do not have routine access, and who have rather clunky models of how inter-webby thing might work. We could think of them affectionately as the world wide plebs
Plebs - definition from the free dictionary
common people, folk, folks - people in general (often used in the plural); "they're just country folk"; "folks around here drink moonshine"; "the common people determine the group character and preserve its customs from one generation to the next"
so here we are back in the life online
some of us have one, some of us don't... some of us who do, are not there all the time
and I am coming back to some old ideas - technology affordances, barriers to learning hmmm...
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