Reflection, learning , careers and employability

The problem
Put stuff to do with careers and employability on the curriculum and you are guaranteed to have the students in revolt before you can blink your eyes. I have already been working on ways of making the educational side of this process better for the students, This year I have an opportunity to try to make some innovations which impact on assessment and feedback.

Introduction: My Situation
This week those two agendas have bubbled to the surface in an interestingly counterposed manner

1) I am tasked with 'teaching' students to complete reflective portfolios which I will later mark

This is a task and a subject area which they often hate with a passion;
think is a waste of time and would generally dump in preference for getting on with some meaty topic which they perceive as being relevant to their chosen degrees.

2) I am tasked with working with colleagues to develop our employability agenda across and within the curriculum

Things which are easy to do may be totally ineffectual as far as the students who need assistance are concerned.
Many of our students are highly employable, and willingly develop their own employability skills out of class, we have good general employment rates.
Those students who have difficulties may be self consious, odd, shy, lacking in self confidence, confused, or generally struggling. Such students may not respond to additional structured activities, and we are to be advised to design any such activities with great care

Portfolios

The portfolios the students will create are structured to help them with their learning ( a practical task) but are also seen to be relevant to the careers and employability agenda. I am shuddering at the whiff of the letters PDP, and of course the students have a lot of baggage in that area as well. School portfolios and skills classes mean this is a very difficult area of the curriculum. I am having to work hard to help the students understand what might be in it for them, beyond a few marks for a fairly simple task, which gets them a little closer to the end of their degree. I think the processes have great value, I am not however convinced about the outputs. Let me expand...

Some ethical considerations

I have a few ethical concerns which are in the area of the process of reflective logs and portfolios generally. Different people will reflect in different ways. Students need a great deal of self confidence plus the sense of personal safety to be able to reveal their inner thoughts on their successes and failures in writing.

Faced with the prospect of answering/interpreting a series of short questions to put into a document to be potentially ripped apart by the critical eye of an academic, many of them take an opt out of this activity and rather than offering reflections, offer bland statements which distance themselves from the process, and protect themselves from any harm.

My Dilemma
I am not sure it is easy to award a fair mark for such a personal activity. Students rely on clear assessment criteria to assist them in objective tasks, but clearly reflection and creating a reflective portfolio is highly subjective.

This puts me in a difficult position. What am I to do? How should I mark these portfolios? Should I mark the portfolios? Surely the fact that they are marked will change their purpose?

Last year I read each portfolio, constucted an individual mark which was based on what I understood to be the level of engagement based on the content with which I was presented. I was not sure when I marked each portfolio, from what base each student was starting.

I constructed some generic feedback, and sent this to all the students. Each portfolio had some individual comments, I was wary of being hurtful to the individuals, bit I tried to provide constructive feedback and criticisms.

So.... this year we are asking another cohort to produce portfolios. For the marking I will be:

1. meeting with each student individually for 10 minutes to discuss their portfolio
   .... for some reason I was suddenly reminded of a recent rather unsatisfactory appraisal meeting....
2. The meetings will be videod for moderation purposes and quality assurance.
   
3. I am thinking of making an audio recording of each session which I mail to the student at the close of the discussion, so that they have their own record of the proceedings.
4. I will produce a generic feedback document for this cohort

Discussion points
It will be interesting to see how I can streamline the process, from the point of view of producing the audio and video, making sure it is indexed and analysing what the students' perception of the process compared to their previous experiences - quite a few methodological challenges in that little bit, never mind the technology.

I hope that my personal awareness will serve the students well. I suddenly have another memory, this time of a comment from a one-time vice chancellor at another university. "We deal with student's life chances, we don't have the right to fuck them up"!

It may be that the already self confident fill in such forms with ease and as a result get a good mark, but I do not believe that their ease with the task will help the employability of the whole cohort. We are working with engineering students. We have a high level of dislexia across our student cohort. I had a student close to tears today because of some comments he had received on a previously submitted portfolio.

The good bit
I suppose because I am sensitive to the possible shortcomings, and I do care about how the students benefit, I will bring these considerations to bear in our school planning and discussions.

how to find statistics on social media

How to find statistics on social media is a question I often need the answer to. Browsing Mashable this morning I chanced across and interesting blog with just that title "How to find statistics on social media".

I was however also partly prompted to raise this because of a tweet by Jim Hendler "Internetworldstats says 1.4 billion people use the Web. CIA factbook says 800M people are literate. My head explodes."

With social media grabbing the headlines, and falling into the hands of publicists - described by one pundit as being lower in the pecking order than snake oil sellers ( and therefore presumably also estate agents) we are reminded that we need all our critical faculties when looking at statistics - whether they are about social media or any other topic.

So Bobby Johnston has declared in his Guardian blog "Why I am finished with social media" getting a good slew of comments, and pointing to some of the reasons why we need a pinch of salt when we use and muse on what we understand as being the phenomena of social media and web 2.0.

All of which is a challenge to us in universities who are researching new technology applications and trying to educate tomorrows technological trailblazers about the ways of the world.

this is a topic which could benefit from a lot more exploration. My interim conclusion - well there is an echo of Gladwell - 10,000 hours to mastery? Maybe we had better find some time to think about things. You can't reach conclusions without doing the thinking, you can't use statistics unless you think about them before you try to explain them. and by the way, you will need to think about the context of the phenomena you are analysing (but then I would say that because I am a social constructivist). Ah, then maybe you need to find out a bit more about the 'perspective' of the source of your statistics, and see how you can make them 'objective'.

This is a big message which we need to communicate to research students, and which we need to remind ourselves of on a daily basis.

hmmm.... time to think

Learning Literacies and Digital Natives -> digital literacies??

Those good folk at Glasgow Callie are doing some interesting stuff with their leaning literacies project LLiDA.
As well as gathering data about the student learning experience (see my previous blog about their paper digital natives myth or reality) they are busy at work

1. collecting exemplars of best practice in supporting the development of learning literacies
2. getting institutions to audit their current practice to gain a profile of current activities from a universities' perspective

I did get a bit confused by their email requesting snapshots of institutional practice - I was all ready to go out with the digital camera, and confess I was a bit disappointed to learn that they wanted words and explanations - but hey ho, that will teach me to read a little more deeply in future!

Helping People with their careers

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.

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.

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 ;-)

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.