TASH

Progress update

2009-11-29T17:06:00.004Z

From within the press of the taught semester, it's hard to find space to reflect on longer-term projects and work still in progress. So, apologies for the silence on the blog; and many thanks to those who have commented on and supported TASH via the uSpace group.

The resource is now live, and a number of specific groups of students are being targeted as beta-testers for the site. These include:

TILL students who have the misfortune to be taught by me and Willy, especially in study skills contexts;
Engineers, with whom Linda Gray is working; and
English Literature students, who Bob McKay is supporting.

There are also other students working with staff associated with TASH who have been pointed towards it in less systematic ways; and bits of feedback are reaching us from different colleagues about how useful they've found it. We're hoping to arrange more formal evaluations of the resource next semester (1) with (or via) the Union Links, and (2) with the Study Abroad / Erasmus students arriving for the spring semester. This formal evaluation will sit alongside the uSpace area for feedback and comments from all users of the site, which will remain open and vibrant during the next semester.

Behind the scenes, we're working to ensure the stability of the resource. In the short term, this stability involves someone doing some technical work at the back end, a someone we're close to appointing. It also involves continuing to respond to the uSpace feedback, tidying up the resource, and adding new links when they are suggested. Medium term, we will be designing the promotion strategy for the spring semester in the next few weeks. Strong ideas already on the table are (1) a Faculty-specific approach, making sure there's engagement and awareness on this level, and responses to requests to feedback; and (2) sitting with departmental Learning and Teaching Advocates, offering hands-on tuition for the resource, and exploring how it might be embedded in different learning contexts.

And longer-term, ensuring stability means creating a post to look after the whole kit and caboodle. We're getting there with this project, although such things will always take a certain amount of time, and are of course subject to the whims of future internal and external policy demands. And the future is, for everyone, currently looking rather whimful.

It’s alive!

2009-10-02T16:21:00.002+01:00

It's been a little longer in gestation than we'd intended, but version one of the TASH resource is now online and ready for beta testing. You're most welcome to play around with the beta version of the site, and share your feedback with the TASH team. The best way to do this will be via the TASH uSpace group, which is open to all staff and students, and is intended as a space for thinking and discussing the resource. We are inviting all past and present friends of the project to take a good look around, trial the site with their students, and let us know what you did and what you thought about it over the coming weeks and months. The resource is still in beta testing, and we're aware of a couple of glitches – so please be charitable!

We'd also like to invite you to a brief "soft launch" of the resource at 1pm on Monday 19th October in CILASS Collaboratory 1 in the Information Commons. Project members will be on hand to talk you through where we're at with the resource at this point, and how we hope to improve upon it in the future. The meeting will last no more than one hour, and there will be sandwiches.

We are particularly hoping that Sheffield staff will be willing to pilot all or part of the site with existing students so that we can obtain feedback on how the site can be improved, how resource gaps can be plugged, and what you'd like to see from the resource in the future. We'd also like to hear from colleagues with ideas about how they might or have used the resource over the course of semester one.

If you are able to come along to this launch, please let us know by emailing tash@shef.ac.uk, and we'll look forward to seeing you then. Thanks for your support so far, and have fun with the site!

Summer school

2009-08-14T15:52:00.002+01:00

Despite appearances, I'm told it's currently summer; and like most of the University, the TASH project has been both trying to tidy up from the previous year, and look ahead to the next. In our case, this has meant a lot of editing and writing of pages, and location of suitable academic skills resources. The bulk of the work has been done here by Bob McKay, who, from his secret Arctic base - well, his house in Glasgow - has been lovingly crafting and smoothing numerous pages for the site, and locating high-quality academic skills development resources to support them. Danny and Karen have also been carrying on with the technical side of the site, both making it look pretty and that it all works; and trying to make sure it fits together in the most comprehensible way. That structural side is still something we're working on, as it looks like from our original plan of seven skills / seven hills, after the processes of writing and finding resources, we're left with five skills / five...erm...rivers? Much of the content has stayed the same, we've just found other ways to locate it that we think will be more comprehensible to users.

We're aiming for a soft launch at the end of September, offering promotional material and support to key personnel, such as Level One tutors, staff who look after induction processes, and support and academic staff who have shown a commitment to TASH as it has developed. Keeping this initial launch relatively small will enable us to gather high-quality feedback on the resource and its uses, and enable us to improve it for a more full-blooded launch at the start of the second semester. So if you're reading this, we're likely to be in touch in the next month or so with information about that soft launch, and quite possibly a range of promotional goodies. The site launched in September will be version 1.0 of the resource; and we hope that this phased release will enable us to amend and update the site in response to user feedback. I hope you'll be part of that conversation!

HE Preparation Project

2009-06-29T15:40:00.004+01:00

Tim and I met with Jo Laycock from SRAM last Friday. Jo is heading up an Aimhigher funded HE Preparation Project through which she hopes to engage a number of cohorts of year 12-13 students in schools and colleges in the region through a range of workshops on and off campus. The specific focus is upon developing study skills which will stand students in good stead when they progress on to degree courses here at TUOS and elsewhere.

Jo is currently meeting with colleagues around the institution to pick brains on the most appropriate ways to tackle and present study skills work of this kind - and she will shortly be consulting with teachers in the region to see how her project can best complement their work in the classroom. One suggestion to emerge from our meeting was the organisation of a workshop in the autumn at which TUOS colleagues who teach study skills in a variety of different guises might come together to swap ideas, techniques and research to inform one another's work on this and related areas.

We wish Jo well with her important work and look forward to her pulling off this workshop in the academic new year ... it would certainly be of interest to TASH as we move to embed the online resource in a range of different face-to-face teaching contexts.

Employability Learning Objects Project

2009-06-29T15:06:00.002+01:00

Marcus Zientek and Hilary Whorrall have been hard at work in the Careers Service developing a range of "re-usable learning objects" with colleagues in Animal and Plant Sciences, ScHARR, Human Communication Science, Human Nutrition and Town & Regional Planning. These MOLE courses are designed to help undergraduate students identify and refine their employability skills, covering a range of subjects which include Learning Styles, CV writing, Skills self-assessment, preparing for Psychometric testing and Interviews.

In each case the learning objects have been embedded within specific modules at a range of levels and attract a small proportion of credit toward students' final marks. The amount of time required to complete the worksheets and other interactive tasks within the learning objects ranges from 2 to 20 hours.

Three additional RLOs, covering proactive job searching, commercial awareness and enterprise, can be accessed by all TUOS students via the graduating in a recession pages here.

To find out more, email Marcus at m.zientek@shef.ac.uk or Hilary at h.whorrall@shef.ac.uk

Pilot testing 25 June

2009-06-26T09:27:00.003+01:00

Thanks to the students who kindly gave up their time yesterday morning to run a critical eye over the TASH site as it now stands. Still very much a work in progress, but I think all of the project team present shared my relief when we were offered an overwhelmingly positive set of responses; and plenty of helpful suggestions as to where we might tinker with the design and feel of the site to make it better still.

It seems then that we are not barking up the wrong tree - quite the reverse in fact from what a number of the students had to say - and will, with renewed confidence, get on with the substantial work that remains to be done in developing and refining the site in preparation for a "soft launch" to interested parties and likely key users in mid-September.

Preparing for pilot testing

2009-06-12T17:11:00.002+01:00

It's been a very busy month or so, with a lot of work going into the design and structure of the TASH resource. It currently looks really nice, albeit with a few rough edges; and we're at a stage now where, by the end of June, we're hoping to pilot test the site with students (more info at the end of the post). The pilot testing should identify issues of structure, content, navigation, and design that will help us develop the resource further, and make sure it meets the needs of its core users, the students. Building on this testing, there will be a student read-through of the revised resource later in July to make sure that the authors haven't come on like disco vicars, trying to be down with the kids, but revealing themselves to be the crusty old men they actually are.

What seems most likely at the moment is that the TASH resource will be launched softly and selectively in September 2009, to key stakeholders such as Level One tutors, learning and teaching advocates, professional services staff involved in induction and transition support, and so on. We'll use the first semester of 09/10 as an extended beta testing phase, gathering feedback and adding resources and materials to the site. We'll then have a more public launch at the start of the second semester, at a time when hopefully students will have more time and space to engage, and perhaps even the direct motivation if their autumn semester experiences haven't been all they expected. We're also clear now, as we have been all along, that the TASH site that gets signed off is only version 1, and it will be expected to develop and grow as more uses and needs are recognised. The aim is to create a simple site with room to grow, and that aim still looks to be achievable in a realistic timeframe.

If you're a Sheffield student and would like to pilot test the resource, some time in the last week of June, please contact us. Your feedback will be essential for making sure we get the look, feel, and content of the resource right, and we will be able to reward you for your time.

National Learning Network materials

2009-05-08T15:33:00.002+01:00

One of the pleasures of working on TASH is people contacting you with interesting ideas and resources that they've found useful, and want to share. Victor Guillen of the ELTC did just that, by calling our attention to the National Learning Network, or NLN. This is a JISC-funded repository for e-learning materials, targeted primarily at FE institutions and programmes, but with possible cross-over for some aspects of HE provision. Victor's found it particularly useful in terms of ESOL and literacy materials, but was keen to show us more generic resources about, for example, critical thinking, problem solving, and learning to learn.

The resources are SCORM-compliant Reusable Learning Objects, which, to put that in terms I can understand, means you can pick them up complete, and drop them into MOLE, Moodle, and other VLEs or platforms. They are also finished to a high degree of professionalism, with some of them looking really nice, and presenting the material in a very accessible way. The flipside of this professional finish is that they can't be easily tinkered with or adapted to fit new contexts; but, as Victor was keen to note, they are just as useful for inspiring your own ideas for resources and activities as they are for being used directly.

Sheffield's only the second HEI in the region to request access to the NLN, so it's still largely uncharted territory. This, plus Jorum, points to the growth of e-repositories for sharing learning resources; and while there are a range of arguments, from grounds as diverse as pedagogy, politics, and pragmatism, against a wholesale adoption of the strategy, it's certainly useful to have access to other people's ideas and ways of working out solutions. If anyone's interested in looking more closely at the NLN materials, or learning more about how they've already been used, then Victor would welcome you getting in touch.

What we did on our Easter holidays...

2009-05-07T16:50:00.003+01:00

...and for quite some time around that. Despite the blog silence, the TASH project is alive and well, and developing in a robust and sustainable direction. Indeed, it's a measure of how busy things have been that blogging our progress has taken something of a backseat.

There have been a few main areas of efforts, with our ever-expanding team distributed across them. These include:

Creating the structure. Obvious, but essential. What academic skills are we finding resources for, and how are we bundling them together? How much choice are we giving users about the ways they navigate the resource? In what's likely to be a sizeable end-product, how do we make sure users know what's there?
Writing the pages. Again, this isn't rocket science; most bits of the structure mentioned above need to have some words / pictures / videos / dancemoves attached to them, and it's been a job of work to get those created.
Finding and analysing the resources, from both within and outside the university. The whole point of TASH was to help students and staff more easily locate high-quality resources, so that's clearly something we need to prioritise.
Designing the look and feel of the resource, along with all the other technical things involved with creating a website that I don't really understand. A huge amount of effort and time has gone into making TASH friendly, funky, and easily-navigable, and the experience of LeTS colleagues has been critical here.

Where we're at now is bringing those four threads of work together into a pilot version of the site. We're hoping to have this ready, and run tests / feedback sessions with staff and students, by the end of June. If you've ever attended a TASH meeting or expressed interest in the project - and, let's face it, you're unlikely to be reading this blog unless you have - then you'll be invited to take part in these pilot tests. If you're especially keen to get involved, please contact us and we'll add you to the list. Thanks for your interest thus far, and we hope to be in touch again soon!

Dec 16 meeting notes available

2009-02-06T15:31:00.002Z

The briefest of updates to say notes from the last TASH update meeting on December 16th are now available from here, the main TASH webpages. You can download Willy's PowerPoint, including exciting diagrams, from the same page, or from the SlideShare button to the left.

As per my last post, the core team have all been beavering away with their various tasks. Linda and Jen have been officially joined by Diane Rossiter, and all three are looking at how other institutions structure their academic skills resources, especially any interactive execises. Steve and Danny are working on the design and structure of the site, while Chris carries on tagging, analysing, and ordering the numerous skills resources we've discovered. Louise is making sure we're meeting all our deadlines and liasing with our elders and betters; and myself, Willy, and Bob are writing the damn thing....It's slow, hard work, condensing all we want to say into a few hundred words: to quote Henry Thoreau, "Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short." And Kath has, temporarily at least, gone off to be a full-time mum, which I don't *think* is a measurable output of the project, but is certainly a cause for celebration.

Small is beautiful

2009-01-16T16:19:00.002Z

I wanted to report on two small-scale TASH meetings this morning, the first with Steve Collier and Danny Monaghan; the second with Luke Desforges, all of whom are from LeTS in various guises. Willy, Chris, and myself discussed with them the structure of the resource, and made some really good progress on thinking about how it can achieve what we want.

Essentially, we've simplified and stripped back the structure to make it easier for users to navigate and find what they want. This has involved slightly re-thinking our division of skills and clarifying what fits where (sometimes, understandably, in more than one place), and drawing up rough typologies of users of the site. We guess there will be people coming to it for the first time, and needing to see what it does overall; those who will be familiar with the general idea, and wanting to develop specific areas; and others who will come in very focussed, looking for something to help them solve a particular problem. The ways we offer to navigate the site should cater for all of these (and more), and getting the structure right is essential for making sure it's used in the most effective ways. We also (excitingly and a little geekily) discussed some of the add-ons we could use for the site - stars for users to review resources (a la Amazon), tag clouds (an idea filched from Canterbury Christ Church), this week's top ten resources, and so on.

The meeting with Luke sketched out a Theory of Change for the project, so we know what we want to do, and how we know whether we've done it. This is in its final draft stages, so will be available from the main project pages in the next few weeks. What I gained from the process is a clearer sense of the timescale of the project, and also of the scope - there's plenty it'd by *useful* to do achieve through it, but they're not necessarily all *essential*. Doing the Theory of Change helped filter out the essential from the useful, and keep our ambitions more grounded in reality - less Napoleon, more Nye Bevan.

There are lots of small things for us to do next, and plenty of hands to do them. The next immediate deadline is the end of Feb for creating content that Danny and Steve can turn into a testable resource. We'll see how things go from there...

Time to start making...

2008-12-16T18:54:00.003Z

Today's meeting in Bartolome House was a great opportunity for colleagues to catch up with progress on the TASH project, and find out where we're going next. Given the busy time of year, not everyone could make it, and particular thanks to those who did; it was really useful from the core team's point of view, especially in getting feedback about the general structure and design of the site. This is only the first report from the meeting, trying to reflect some of the key ideas; there will be others, thanks to Louise and Willy's prodigious note-taking skills, and materials like Willy's PowerPoint presentation will also be posted in due course.

So, what did we learn today? Mainly, that it feels like time to take what we can from the consultation process (roughly, the last six months of the project), and move onto a stage where we're doing, creating, and testing (the next six months). Input from colleagues has been important throughout, and particularly so in today's meeting, but it seems like we need to start firming up what TASH will be, do, and look like, before we can move onto the next stage of testing and consultation.

The materials Willy and I presented today were always going to be rough, but I think it took the comments of participants to identify just how much more work needed doing. We handed round some draft "rapid routes", linear pathways that would take users from general introductory pages to specific resources. Questions were quite rightly asked about how long these would take, and whether the tone was quite right; and the difficulties were discussed of modelling the complexities of website navigation through a series of essentially linear routes. We also shared some rough reflection exercises, intended to help students get a better sense of what TASH could do specifically for them. These need a lot more work - they need to be more interactive, more focused on targeted academic skills and resources, and more reason given for students to engage with them (encouraging tutors to use them in formative assessment were suggested, and this seems like a good route to pursue). So while the specific materials we disseminated weren't perhaps as camera-ready as we in the core team had hoped, the feedback we got on them was extremely useful, and we can spend the next few months doing the spade-work of constructing the TASH resource for testing.

And that's what we'll do, really; retreat to individual offices, putting pen to paper, cursor to screen, or crayon to wall depending on our creative styles. Come April (or so), we hope to have a version of the site ready for testing, and we'll be in touch with everyone who's ever shown an interest in TASH then. Then during the summer, we'll promote it across the institution, and start the long, slow process of embedding it in institutional practices. One of the most useful comments today came from Lyn Parker, talking about her experiences with the MOLE Information Skills tutorials. First, she had to create them, and publicise them to academic staff. Then, she needed to get them embedded in individual modules and departmental cultures. It was during this second phase that the largest number of students engaged. It might well be that TASH follows a similar arc.

Thanks again to all who came today, and more reports will follow soon!

Brief update from the core team

2008-11-22T10:50:00.003Z

We've been disseminating stuff by email and via our website of late, so this blog has fallen a little by the wayside. However, to return it to its original purpose of providing short, pithy updates about where we are, here goes a summary of the last few weeks' activity within the core team...

The TASH website has been updated with all sorts of materials exploring the content, design, and scope of the resource, and is intended to be an introduction to the whole project - so tell your friends. We're publicising vigorously the next general update meeting on December 16th, where you'll be able to find out more about all these things, and carry on the big-tent discussions we've been threading through the project. You can express your interest in the meeting here. In preparation for this meeting, the core team have divvied up jobs between them, preparing materials, scoping out what's available, and adding more detail to the questions of design and structure, which, we all know, will be crucial for getting students engaged. In some areas, it's been really good to see we have loads of academic support resources, as this makes our job choosing between them and working out how to make connections. In others, we're still looking for support materials, and will have a more specific list of these topics after the 16th; in the meantime, you're most welcome to send to Chris any resources or websites that you find help your students develop their academic skills. And finally, with The Sheffield Graduate project going live, it's great that the environment has been created for discussing transferable skills amongst staff and students, and that some of the best practice in the university has been shared. We look forward to working with and building on the Sheffield Graduate project, and continuing to help students go further in what they already do.

And I'll stop here, as if it's one skill I want to improve through this project, it's concision.

Final student focus group, and meeting with Patrice Panella

2008-10-24T15:42:00.002+01:00

Continuing the stepped-up pace of recent blogging, this is a short report on two good TASH meetings this week - the fourth focus group with more students from across the institution, and a helpful discussion with Patrice Panella of CiCS. The focus group first - thanks to the students who came out for this, and shared their views about study support, academic writing, and a whole host of other issues. One particular skill that drew plenty of comment was time management, again identified as a key skill that students need to quickly develop at university - as one participant explained, "If you don't manage the time well, your self-motivation goes, because you think there's too much for me to do, and I can't be bothered". Greater guidance on how to divide up your work time and meet the competing responsibilities all students face would be welcome, as would more of an acknowledgment that the practices of academic life are complex and not necessarily natural -

In your first year, you're literally sent off to a lecture theatre with a notepad and a pen, and told 'go and learn, go and learn, it'll be good', and you sort-of go, 'Right, ok'...It takes you a good three or four months to work something out.

This group of students in particular were keen on writing support, and offering more clear guidance about what is expected from university essays. Greater support early on would mean "a lot more effort would be available for people to do the beginning of their academic work if they weren't trying to get the nuts and bolts right". Yet at the same time, there was acknowledgement that maybe different disciplines required different things in essay writing - and maybe even different tutors within the same discipline. So (and I'm drawing heavily here on work by Mary Lea and Brian Street) the TASH resources on academic literacy need to equip students not just to determine and address the demands of different disciplines, but also to be comfortable switching between different disciplinary paradigms of knowledge. We all do this all the time, of course, but the academic world might offer an appearance of epistemological uniformity that belies its varied and complex nature.

The academic world has also passed through a strange historical moment, where learning, teaching, and research were seen to be done over here, in oak-panelled libraries and high-tech laboratories, while supporting the infrastructure for these activities was done over there, in open-plan offices and functional administration blocks. Thankfully, we're now coming out the other side of this, and at Sheffield, it's particularly welcome to see CiCS becoming explicitly recognised as playing a part in learning and teaching. They have always, of course, supported these activities (and much else of what goes on in the institution - Chris Sexton's blog does a nice job of spelling out how far their influence spreads), but through projects such as Clearspace, this role will become much more visible. Our meeting with Patrice talked through some of these developments, and how the peer communication facilitated by Clearspace and other Web 2.0 technologies relate to the TASH project. We're moving closer to responding to how students perceive the university as service-users, rather than how we see it as service-providers; and this can only be to the good.

A full report on all the focus groups, and how they've affected the developing TASH project, will follow shortly.

Faculty Librarians get there before us ...

2008-10-22T15:45:00.004+01:00

We managed to keep Maria Mawson and Vic Grant waiting a good 15 minutes whilst I queued for our coffees in the City View Cafe yesterday - top tip to the uninitiated; in semester time, don't arrange to meet on the hour 'cos there's a healthy queue between lectures ...

But more importantly, we also learned that they've got there before us in a hub-like sense too. As two of the six new Faculty Librarians - Vic for Medicine, Maria for Social Sciences - they have their own web pages from which you can find handy links to a range of discipline specific library subject guides (amongst other things). In addition, Medicine, Dentistry, English and History have their very own librarian's blogs so if any of these are your bag, why not take a look? The first two can be accessed via Vic's web page, the latter via Clare Scott's, Faculty Librarian for the Arts and Humanities.

Thanks to Maria and Vic for making the time to meet with (and wait for) us. We look forward to working with them more closely as TASH moves towards its production phase.

Focussing on key issues

2008-10-17T16:50:00.004+01:00

There have been two more focus groups this week - one with staff, one with students - and another is coming next week (Tuesday 21st, 12.30 - email me if you want to come). They, plus one we held back in September, all offered useful contributions to the resource, and helped clarify, and in a few cases fundamentally shift, the direction of the TASH project. Given that one of the grand, long-term aims of the project is to carry on inclusive dialogues about learning, teaching, and the structures we all inhabit and construct, it feels right to be working in this way, and the results are proving very instructive.

One student went to the heart of the project by suggesting that "being independent is asking someone to help you to find that information you need, not just finding it", and it's becoming apparent that the finished TASH resource needs to prioritise explaining why it is useful to staff and students, and that this isn't preparatory to using the resource, it's actually central to it. Another key point of reference is something equally diffuse about developmental frameworks. Everyone seems agreed that staff and students should expect different things from each other and the institution as study continues, whether that's from one module to another, or the higher order of across an academic programme. David Hodge talked very well about this at this year's Learning Through Enquiry Alliance conference, suggesting quite a strong framework for learners who move from being closely supported and monitored in their first year, to designing and leading independent projects in their final year; I don't know, with the diversity of learners and structures we have at Sheffield, whether this prescriptive route is helpful, but it's certainly helpful as a descriptive device.

Staff and students were agreed that there needed to be a range of routes to navigate the resource, and that it should be clear, easily-trackable (i.e. you need to know where you've been), and there should be plenty of opportunities to engage. There was a healthy scepticism about whether everyone would choose to perform the self-reflective exercises, or as one participant put it, "[TASH] needs to look interactive, even if you don't want to do the interactive bits", which means we will consider carefully how to structure these exercises within the resource as a whole. It's also true that "TASH has to last the lifetime of somebody's course so it [can't] get boring" - if we're encouraging learners to keep on coming back, we need to find ways to vary and develop the content to maintain their interest. In general, thumbs were up for our lists of skills, although all focus groups gave time-management greater prominence than it apparently holds within our current framework; this is fine, and if that's one hook for bringing people into the resource, then we'll foreground it as much as appropriate.

After the next focus group, I'm planning to write a report summarising the discussions, and make this and all the notes publicly available online. My thanks to all who have participated in the groups thus far, and it seems fitting to end with one quotation that again captures neatly the mood TASH is building on and developing: "It's important that students know they're working with the lecturers and not against them". Absolutely.

Our man in the Arts Faculty

2008-10-17T13:22:00.003+01:00

One of the several things I've conspicuously failed to report here on the blog is that Bob McKay, of the School of English, agreed a month or so back now to join the TASH core team as the key link within the Arts Faculty. We're delighted to have Bob on board, not least because he is already heavily involved in a number of projects which have more or less direct application to TASH's aims.
Bob and I have started working on small but concrete examples of how the TASH resource might frame student engagements with particular areas of the resource and, via different forms of feedback, be signposted out the other side to specific resources addressing different skills sets in more depth. We hope to have one or two preliminary examples ready for virtual comment by the end of the month.

Welcome, Bob ... and if you wanted someone with the Arts brief to pester, Bob's your man!

Group work presentation materials - Hispanic Studies

2008-10-17T12:25:00.002+01:00

Tim and I had a very helpful meeting with David Wood today in the mid-riff of the Arts Tower (a geographical first for me). David has worked with CILASS to develop a range of resources to support his students with the preparation and delivery of group work presentations - you can read more here and download supporting resources too.

The approach David has taken closely mirrors some of our own thinking about possible ways of introducing students to the challenges involved with presentations of this sort - and what makes a good presentation or not (e.g. by providing short video clips of better and worse examples of presentations for students to assess using suggested criteria ... and compare with "model" examples of feedback on each).

We are hopeful that we will be able to draw directly upon his and his colleagues' experience of developing and embedding this material when we create the TASH sections on presentation skills. Regardless, we now know that a really useful body of materials already exist in Hispanic Studies to signpost out to from the hub. Our thanks to David for taking the time to share his experience with us.

Patchworks and frameworks: core team meeting

2008-10-09T16:53:00.004+01:00

The TASH core team has met to catch up, exchange progress reports, and work out where we're going next; and it's all looking pretty positive. The biggest piece of news is that we've decided to cancel the October 31st meeting, although aim to have all the documents and ideas ready for that date, and release them through our ever-evolving website. The thinking is if we're going to do mostly front-led update stuff, we might as well save everyone's time, and do it virtually, rather than ask people to give up a couple of hours at a busy time of year. So, if it has been in your diary, thank you; and feel free to reclaim it for catching up with blogs / talking to colleagues / going fishing, or whatever.

It was really nice for everyone to get together and find out what's been going on. And it's a lot - Steve has been beavering away at the technical side, and exploring the best ways for our core team (growing like topsy) to communicate with one another; and his LeTS colleague, Louise, has been sorting out the finances, the website, and generally keeping us all pulling in the same direction. Chris has been talking with the Medical faculty, and organising a meeting where we can all sit round the same table to discuss TASH; and Jen and Linda have carried on their ferreting out of resources from Engineers, and putting them into some kind of coherent framework. Kath's been talking to the Science faculty and working on the design and feel of the site - her rather natty metaphor today was about a patchwork resource, stitching together disparate sources into something coherent, structured, and with little somethings for everyone. And Willy and myself haven't, contrary to appearances, just been scratching ourselves and drafting gargantuan emails; we've been organising focus groups, thinking about what we want in the resource, and working out how to do it. We've now divided up the different tasks going forward, and it's hoped by the end of October we'll have an outline map of the resource, some more concrete ideas about design, and maybe even some examples of how it might all work to publicise via the website. More details about events as they unfold will be posted here, and we'll carry on with this more public side of the conversation and debate throughout the project's lifespan.

The Union's View

2008-10-02T17:00:00.001+01:00

Rebecca Watson

Education Officer, Union of Students

One common goal that the Union and the University are working towards is making students conscious of academic skills. When a student enters University, the learning and teaching resources available to them are infinite: the problem is knowing the channels to access them and using them appropriately.

However, these academic skills are not extrapolated from books, or monotonous sheets of paper. Many academic skills are intangible; students acquire them when they are put into the appropriate environments, stimulated by ideas and tasks. These ideas are catalysts to student learning.

This is why TASH is a much needed navigational and promotional tool for those learning resources both for students and staff. It gives students an opportunity to identify with themselves what they need in their learning environment and more importantly how they get there. It will also appropriately disseminate the material in an accessible format, ensuring that as many students as possible receive it.

Furthermore, one of TASH's greatest assets is that it is tool open to any student of any year of study. There is a common consensus that first years are the only group of students that need to be guided along the learning journey but there is in fact a growing recognition of the need to develop academic skills at many different levels of study.

University Projects are expanding and developing all the time and therefore can benefit students at whatever stage they are in their academic development paths. TASH provides that accessibility – identifying paths for all levels of academic study. In addition, TASH will provide an interface for all existing university projects such as ELTC, MASH, Dyslexia Support, and Library Information Literacy tutorials, bringing together a wealth of learning resources 'under one roof'.

We are delighted as the student's union, to see that TASH is keen to involve students before its launch – putting a large emphasis on student contribution, participation and interestingly, student leadership in the project. This will ensure that the project stays up to date, student focused, and meeting the needs of all students. I urge you to forward your examples of best practice, which can be used institution wide and improve the learning experiences of all students.

Moving on...report on the September 16th meeting

2008-09-16T17:12:00.002+01:00

Today’s project meeting was very successful, both in terms of being able to disseminate what has happened on the project thus far, and for getting feedback, questions, steers, and more interested parties on board. In terms of disseminating project activities, this was done through a series of presentations by core team members – Kath Linehan on her work with the Pure Science LTAs and the tutor-facing guides written to date; Linda Gray sharing her work with the Engineering LTAs and the location of academic skills resources within her faculty; Steve Collier reporting on our first focus group with students; and Willy Kitchen talking about the evolving design and structure of the resource. (Copies of all these presentations are available by clicking the links, or from the project website). There were very helpful questions asked, and lots of good discussion points raised, both in this reporting section and the more general discussion; and I’ll discuss a few of the ones that stayed with me.

The over-riding message was that we need to emphasise the relevance to students of the resource. Their motivation, it was suggested, includes fair slices of wanting to get a job, and wanting to learn more about a subject that interests them; so we need to ensure that TASH addresses both these user needs. This relates closely to getting the language right – not all staff, let along students, will respond to phrases like “academic literacy”, so we need to ensure the terms we use are broad and welcome enough to encompass a range of perspectives and users. One way to achieve this is via student-generated material, or, equally excitingly, materials generated by recent graduates; there are precedents for both of these, for example the excellent CILASS Student Ambassador Network pages, and the Careers Service’s podcasts about “A day in the life of…” all sorts of exciting people. We also need to ensure that the resource meets its promises of being multimedia and rich, to cater for the wide range of learning styles and backgrounds of our students. This is by way of some defensiveness – if at the moment the project team are concentrating a lot on written documents, it doesn’t mean that the entire resource will have outputs in this format! And finally, we need to ensure the whole range of staff in the university are included and interested in the resource. The particular groups identified in discussion included hourly-paid staff, in teaching and support capacities, and full-time support staff; often, these people are the more friendly face within a department, to whom the student will turn. They, therefore, need to be in-tune with TASH, and aware of what it has to offer.

So, what next? Organising focus groups is the next big task, and we’re in active discussions with the Union of Students, CILASS, and other established networks to support this. We’ll also be concentrating on finding what resources are already available within the institution, and where possible, generating tutor-facing guides to communicate these in a standard form. And we’ll also be continuing to look at our skills areas, and benchmarking them against documents with general currency, such as The Sheffield Graduate profile. If we receive as much support and enthusiasm for the rest of the project as we did in today’s meeting, then it should be (relatively speaking) a walk in the park.

Medical Faculty developments

2008-09-12T15:51:00.004+01:00

Hi from the Medical Faculty,

Not being able to make the general update meeting next week (I've got a note from my Doctor), I thought I'd update the TASH blog on the meetings I have had so far.

Both Professor Shelagh Brumfitt (Chair of Teaching Committee, Human Communications Science) and Dr Angela Fairclough (Chair of Teaching Committee, Dentistry) have cheerfully given up their time to talk to me about what they see as possible directions for TASH. Although I met them individually, there was a surprising similarity in the responses I got. Either there is some cheating going on, or the issues within the Medical Faculty surrounding the provision of Academic Skills are fairly similar.

In both onversations I have had, skills already identified by stakeholders in TASH were discussed (note-taking, letter writing and presenting seem popular), and then the issue of skills for both professional and interprofessional working were identified. In particular, the attitudes and skills that are necessary when working in teams. These are critical for the delivery of health care, and I am now attempting to clarify which skills TASH should prioritise for the Medical Faculty. Some resources have already been identified which I am in the process of checking out, and both departments have reported that they think that TASH resources can easily be placed into the curricula when available.

I would like to thanks both Shelagh and Angela for their time. Next stop, the Medical School!

Pre-HE Qualifications developments

2008-09-05T17:04:00.003+01:00

Some of you will be aware of the sterling work being done by Laura Lane, UK Qualifications officer with Admissions, assisting departments in framing their responses to the new qualifications being offered by schools and colleges from the start of this academic year. In particular, all departments need to update their UCAS entry requirements taking into account the new Advanced Diplomas, AQA Bacc and Cambridge Pre-Us.

As part of TASH's ongoing dialogue with SRAM, I attended a roundtable discussion for Faculty of Arts and Humanities admissions tutors yesterday, hosted by Laura and Ana Kingston (Head of Admissions), at which many of the issues raised by these developments were aired. From the point of view of TASH, I just wanted to flag up one key area of discussion, and to note how we may be able to assist parties on every side of the fence in at least one important aspect common to all the new developments in train - namely the development of Extended Projects, whether as stand alone components of a broader A-level offer, as part of an AQA Bacc, or in the context of the new Advanced Diplomas.

There is a widely acknowledged need to support students, both pre- and post-entry, in the development of increasingly robust academic research, analysis and writing skills, all of which could and, I'd suggest, should be addressed, inter alia, through extended projects such as these. TASH is watching these developments closely and we hope that supporting the generic skills required for effective project working such as this will be one very important way in which we can provide a resource of real value to students both pre- and post- HE entry, whether they come to this institution or not. Indeed this kind of approach can hopefully serve to help others outside HEIs understand a little more of what it is we mean, as a Russell Group institution, when we say we are looking for independent, critical thinking in our prospective, as well as our current students. Precisely the sort of stuff which may assist the work of the lifelong learning networks, referred to by Tim here.

What we did on our summer holidays ...

2008-09-05T16:08:00.004+01:00

Lest the lacuna in the blog be taken as evidence for a complete lack of activity during the oh so sunny month of August, I should record here (since I failed to do so at the time) that the core project team, in various combinations, met on 14 and 29 August to take stock of where we've got to individually and collectively, and to consider where we're going from here. Louise and Steve have variously knocked our heads together to ensure that something more concrete emerges going forward - within a meaningful timeframe and without breaking the bank - and let me assure you all that things continue to progress to the plan inside our heads, even if it might not always look like that from the outside; increasingly tangible and, we hope, coherent statements of what that plan might be will be appearing over the coming months (remember to watch the project webpages for meeting details etc.).

We look forward to beginning this process at the next open meeting on Tuesday 16 September, 11am to 1pm (with tea/coffee to start and sandwiches from midday). Amongst other things we plan to provide a general project update, circulate draft tutor-facing guides to resources, report on the first student focus group hosted today, and talk you through our first working draft of how the TASH resource itself may function. By way of a sneak preview, here's something else inpenetrable I drew at the meeting on 29 August.

Meeting with Higher Futures

2008-09-03T11:54:00.003+01:00

A very positive meeting this morning with Jackie Powell and Mike Bruce from Higher Futures, the lifelong learning network for South Yorkshire. The LLN is a way of bringing together FE colleges with HEIs on a regional basis, and ensuring that there are clear progression pathways available to students from the FE sector. Clearly, there is a job of work to be done here; both HE and FE institutions need to learn more about each other, and what each can bring to the learner's journey, for local students to be given a high-quality service. Vocational learners often bring rich and diverse skill sets to higher education, and often bring a passion for and knowledge of their subject that A-levels, structurally, can't mirror. So Jackie, who co-ordinates the Information, Advice, and Guidance (IAG) aspect of Higher Futures, and Mike, based in this institution, are working hard to make sure this message gets out, and that both sectors are working effectively together.

They were, for obvious reasons, excited about the potential for TASH to bridge this gap between FE and HE learning. They recognised how it might be used as part of an IAG route within their work, and how it could aid both staff and students in understanding what was expected from university study. As much as anything else, it might help develop the confidence of FE students in recognising the skills they can offer HE, particularly important given how much current language and thinking in HEIs is oriented towards students with A-levels rather than other forms of qualification. Alongside all this good feeling, the practical outcome of this meeting was that IAG staff in Higher Futures institutions will have a chance to play with the draft TASH resource, once it is ready after Easter in a testable form. This is clearly good for us, as we get feedback on the resource from practitioners in one of its application contexts; and good for the IAG staff, as they see how the resource will work, can contribute to its ongoing design, and begin to think about embedding and promoting it in FE colleges.

Inside Lynn Parker's head - learning from the Library

2008-08-02T15:15:00.004+01:00

TASH continues to boldly go where angels fear to tread; mixing our metaphors, or should that be adages, at every opportunity. A week last Friday (apologies for the lateness of this post therefore), Tim and I met with Lynn Parker from the Library, chief curator of the voluminous and enormously helpful suite of Information Skills tutorials which are available, by default, to all students and staff via MOLE.

Lynn was able to share a wide range of insights into the challenges involved in trying to embed "reusable learning objects" such as the discrete MOLE tutorials she curates within individual courses and/or student consciousness more generally - but was also keen to stress that the strategy the library has adopted and refined over a number of years now of seeking to tailor and embed generic resources within specific disciplinary contexts was an increasingly successful one.

Key points to emerge from our discussions included:

students generally want to see immediate benefits in terms of tangible progress in their assessed work if they are to engage with more generic study skills materials;
the promotion of such resources by academic staff was crucial to ensure student buy-in, but it was still necessary to tailor examples to specific disciplinary areas wherever possible;
attention to the tone/feel of resources and exercises is important as hostility can quickly grow to a resource or approach if it is perceived as "too easy" or "too much like what I did at school" (this may be a particular challenge for TASH when trying to encourage a critical, self-aware and reflexive approach to the hub, and an attitude to learning which values revision and reassessment of the same skills in different contexts at different stages in the learning journey, from pre-entry to post-graduate and beyond);
there is enormous diversity across individual departments in terms of the nature of assessment tasks and the degree to which independent research, for example, is foregrounded in different disciplinary areas; this can make structuring a generic resource for all extremely challenging;
Lynn has commented to us before on the absence of Information Literacy as a specific named category for TASH, but is prepared to accept the justification that we have previously offered that IL cross-cuts most, perhaps all of our themes, and it is therefore appropriate for it sit outside the formal framework in the same way that we have argued this may also be necessary for attributes such as creativity and resourcefulness;
keeping links and resources up to date in large online products like the Info Skills tutorials - or TASH - is a real challenge and needs careful monitoring.

Lynn sees TASH as one important avenue through which to further publicise the existence and value of the MOLE tutorials to academics and students alike, to "give it a new push" and take its place more squarely alongside other resources available across the institution. She also emphasises the added-value of academic colleagues acting as advocates for such resources alongside professional service curators. These are things we are more than happy to help with, and Lynn has already agreed to contribute to the project by writing a number of tutor-facing guides, organised by reference to the 7 sk/hills framework (academic literacy and written communication being two of the more obvious places to start).

She has also agreed to produce a kind of mind or site map to the tutorials as a whole. We hope this will be of particular value as it became clear to us as the conversation progressed that the inside of Lynn Parker's head contains all sorts of treasures and a very detailed knowledge of the resource she curates. This allowed her to direct us very quickly to a whole host of relevant materials in all manner of different skills areas as the conversation turned from one topic to the next. The problem at present is that it is much harder for those of us on the outside of her head to make these connection as quickly, unless she's there in the room with us. We hope therefore that a map or index of some sort will mean that much of the good work currently being overlooked may be more easily accessed.

Finally, we are mindful of the need for case studies illustrating how close collaboration and embedding of library tutorials within specific disciplinary contexts is achieved in practice. To this end, we will shortly be hunting down Aidan While in Town and Regional Planning, who worked closely with Lynn on a strategy for embedding Information Literacy throughout the undergraduate programme for which he has responsibility. Indeed a brief case study already exists here, on the case studies wiki. Many thanks for your input, Lynn. We will be back.

Tutor-facing pro-forma perfect

2008-08-02T11:55:00.004+01:00

The very first TASH pot of gold to the very first completer of a draft tutor-facing web page guide goes to Harriet Cameron of the Dyslexia Support Service who was our fourth and final discussant for the day. We met at the ELTC, and were delighted to take delivery of a draft which did exactly what we were hoping for, so many thanks to Harriet for that. We also had a very useful discussion about ways of signposting students through and beyond particular resources, and the possibility of Harriet sharing her experience with us at the design stage too. As some of you will already know, Harriet is now leading on the final phase of the online Dyslexia resources first developed by Lizzie Pine and taken forward by Frances Brindley and others, and which we were very happy to promote at the July 17 TASH meeting. Harriet has also offered:

to complete a second tutor-facing guide outlining how one-to-one dyslexia tutorial support can help individual students' academic skills development, and how this kind of support differs from online aspects of the service;
to liaise on our behalf with Claire Shanks, Sarah Armour and others in the Disability Support Team regarding the writing of one or more similar guides to the more general resources Claire's team can offer.

In addition to coming up with some tangible goods so quickly, Harriet's energy and enthusiasm for the project, as well as her coffee and vegetarian tea, was extremely welcome at the end of a day of meetings, and we look forward to working closely with her as the project progresses further.

Just one final thought on the ELTC. I have little doubt that the department will have certain reservations about their building, and particularly perhaps the rather foreboding entry by impersonal grey-box intercom which has to be negotiated to gain access, but they don't half make the most of what they've got. The atmosphere in the reception area - however cramped - is always extremely welcoming; and you will invariably find students and tutors engaged in genuine and lively conversation. This quiet but careful attention to getting the tone right is carried through all of the offices and rooms I've been in - including the Gents' toilets - where the specific needs of international students have clearly been considered wherever possible. Thinking more generally about the design of the TASH resource itself, the Inclusive Learning and Teaching project, as well as the aspiration to improve accessibility and the quality of the student experience for all, I think the organised chaos that is ELTC's reception should be a model of best practice for us all - and something TASH can hope to emulate online and, in time, in a (hopefully slightly less crammed) physical space in Jessop's Edwardian Wing or elsewhere!

Seeing double: when TASH met Tash (Semmens, that is)

2008-08-02T10:48:00.005+01:00

The third of four very successful meetings yesterday was a "working lunch" with Tash Semmens from Law. It was a little galling, on Yorkshire Day, to find the University Arms all sold out of Yorkshire puddings by 1pm, but your correspondent allowed himself a bitter shandy to celebrate instead (strictly in the interests of modelling real world Friday-lunchtime graduate professionalism, you understand).

Like Chetna and Elena beforehand, it was really encouraging to find Tash also full of enthusiam for the project, and offering a series of perspectives and suggestions which clearly complemented those previously put forward by Zoe Ollerenshaw, some of which were previously blogged here. In this earlier posting, we've already flagged up the valuable insights Law can offer in relation to scale, international taught PG students and graduate professionalism (through the LPC) amongst other things. In addition, Tash points up the distinctive aspects that the department's BA in Social Policy and Criminology (shared with Sociological Studies) brings to the mix, and the broader range of social science research skills which these UG students are encouraged to develop alongside the common focus upon problem-solving and analytical skills which they encounter in the law modules which they take. One area in which this manifests itself is the analysis of crime statistics - both quantitative measures of reported crime and more qualitative measures of perceived exposure to crime - and plans are afoot to twist Tash's arm just enough to help us develop a little exercise for the hub looking at some of the issues involved in relation to Sheffield post-code areas, for example, and which can be used as one way of getting students to think about visiting the MASH and other resources if the process of translating figures into words and arguments, and back again, is an uncomfortable one for them ... I'm pleased to report she seems very willing at present.

Other more concrete outcomes from yesterday:

Tash is keen to explore the possibilities of embedding aspects of the TASH resource within the core first year UG module Understanding Law 1, which has already benefitted from close collaboration with the Library and their Information Skills Tutorials, and we will be very happy to keep this dialogue open;
As reported by Tim below, Tash will be contacting second and third year UG mentors who may be willing to help us with a student focus group, tentatively timetabled for Friday 5th September; we hope to haul along some Medics, Dentists and SAN reps too - if you know of any students at a loose end in early September who may have a view on what TASH should contain, please do let us know or encourage them to get in touch;
Tash is also looking to conduct a small piece of research as part of her CILASS academic fellowship looking at (something like) student perceptions of self and their developing status as learners/professionals, which may very well tally with our academic literacy and personal/inter-personal skills categories (and indeed ideas around self-efficacy too, perhaps?) - the idea is likely to involve holding a series of student focus groups which TASH may be able to help facilitate/learn from.

Finally, it is worth noting perhaps that, not for the first time, discussions also touched upon the possibilities of TASH becoming a useful vehicle for embedding elements of skills enhancement exercises into (newly revamped?) PDP strategies - another way in which TASH can serve in time to assist academic colleagues' efforts to support student's individual academic and personal development; and something else to add to the list of cross-institutional initiatives to bring to a project cross-pollination and resourse sharing/pooling meeting?

The MASH/TASH meeting

2008-08-02T10:16:00.002+01:00

The second of yesterday's meetings was with Chetna Patel of the Maths and Statistics Help Service, which supports students across the institution with their maths and stats needs. There are obvious parallels (beyond the chiming names) with TASH, and it was really helpful to get Chetna's perspective on how the two projects might link together. It was also helpful to learn more about Chetna's experience in managing the maths and stats support service, and in working across the university with staff and students.

What Chetna is currently developing is a bank of diagnostic questions in all sorts of maths and stats areas, which will then be filtered and tailored to meet the needs of individual departments and modules. This resource bank will be kept in MOLE, for ease of adaptability, and should be ready in an initial form for the next academic session. The detail that the bulk of these diagnostic tests will examine is much greater than what TASH would aim for, as it is intended more to indicate general areas for student attention, rather than specific topics for detailed investigation. So the main role of TASH here will be to help learners develop their awareness of what support mechanisms are available, and the importance of engaging with them, creating a positive mindset for engaging in more detailed diagnostic tests later in their studies.

Maths and stats - perhaps the latter in particular - cuts across many disciplines, and projects such as the Maths and Stats Teaching Circle are very good at supporting interdisciplinary discussions and exchanges of material. We want to mirror this in TASH, by threading numeracy through the range of self-evaluation activities and materials we produce. and developing a more general form of number confidence in all our learners - and for that matter, our staff. So while maths and stats clearly tick the biggest boxes under the "Research and data handling" and "Problem-solving and analytical skills" categories, we want to make sure they feature elsewhere, and that galouts like me, who have spent a lifetime hiding from quantitative data, are persuaded that it's really not so bad.

Elena Rodriguez-Falcon, and Inclusive Learning and Teaching

2008-08-01T15:57:00.002+01:00

Willy and I have come from a day of TASH meetings, which we will blog separately over the coming days. The first was with Elena, who many of you will know from her work on the Inclusive Learning and Teaching project, her leadership role in Mechanical Engineering, or indeed her indefatigable energy for other projects and innovations. It was great to get her experience of developing an institutional project, especially one that's been so successful in engaging students, and to learn more about what's worked for her in terms of developing and sharing best practice. The main message I took away from the meeting was about the centrality of students, keeping them as the focus of developmental process and end product, and this led to several specific points to take forward.

If we are specifying skills that students should be developing, then we should simultaneously be providing tools for academic and support colleagues to facilitate this development. It's always been imagined that TASH will have a tutor-facing angle, and that this to some extent might overlap with the Case Studies project and other institutional developments. However, talking things through with Elena made it clear just how generous this overlap is, and how many of the institutional projects - ILT, Internationalisation, Graduate Professionalism, to name only the big hitters -are trying to achieve similar things. As Elena put it, we're all trying to improve the student experience, and it would be more effective both for those project teams, and for students, if we were pulling together in some areas. So we're now prioritising the exploration of links with other projects, and trying to identify areas where we might work most effectively together.

Another aspect to this is something I've banged on about before, namely getting a student focus group together at this early stage of the design process. We're now one step closer to making this happen, through another of today's meetings with Tash Semmens. Through the exciting work she does on Understanding Law, she has a team of student tutors, Level Two or Three students who lead tutorials with Level One students; this group have shown great enthusiasm for involvement in module design and consultation processes, and might well be up for sharing what they wish they'd known at the start of Level One. This cohort, plus the Medical and Dental students we've already talked to, and the CILASS student ambassador network (especially given the quality of their new webpages) would form a neat focus group, which we could run before the start of the next session. Today's meeting with Elena, given her success in getting over a hundred students involved in the Inclusive Learning and Teaching project, was instrumental in raising this as a priority; so our thanks to her for this and everything else.

English Language Skills

2008-08-01T10:07:00.004+01:00

As reported earlier in this blog, and at the second TASH meeting, I am running a pilot project, as part of TASH, to make some of excellent material on English Language skills which already exists, available to undergraduates in Geography. Many of our home undergraduates have quite poor written English - reports in the press suggest that this is a widespread problem which seriously affects the employability of graduates. With help from Paul Wigfield and Claire Allam I have put together a selection of the materials from the ELTC teaching materials and the support site for dyslexic students and constructed a module called 'English Language Skills for Geography Students'. In the spirit of TASH, very little has been done to the existing materials - so there is no specific reference to Geography and the examples which are used are not geographical. One of the interesting things will be to see whether students regard this as a problem or not.

The plan is to

Let all staff in Geography know about it so that when they meet personal tutees to review the feedback on their assessed work, they can refer students to it if need be.
Let all students in Geography know about it. We hold a 'welcome back' meeting each semester, with each Level separately, which will be a good vehicle for this.
Build it into our Level 1 skills module, GEO163, which focuses on essay writing among other things.

If anybody would like to take a look at the material, just send me your Novell login (e.g. I am gg1smw).

Self-efficaciously blogging...

2008-07-29T13:25:00.003+01:00

This morning, I had a productive and enjoyable meeting with Jenny Moore of the White Rose Centre of Excellence in the Teaching and Learning of Enterprise (or WRCETLE to its friends). We talked through the range of skills building activities they run, and how these frequently offer powerful learning experiences for students - the WRCETLE's goal of "Placing academic learning in a real-world context" seems to be a powerful one for many learners. Jenny will be completing a tutor-facing guide to some of the resources they offer, thus helping spread them more effectively across the institution, and a lot of what we talked about would benefit students in all seven of the skills areas we've sketched out.

Jenny wanted to put forward a few specific ideas about our seven sk/hills framework, all of which I'm happy to accept. Firstly, she would like some mention of leadership, ideally in the interpersonal skills category - fair enough, and I think this will tie together neatly with PDP and other careers-focused discourses. Secondly, as other people have suggested, creativity needs to get a look-in, this time perhaps cutting across all seven of our areas. And lastly, Jenny drew my attention to the concept of self-efficacy, coming out of the work of Albert Bandura. It can be defined as your understanding of the skills you have to address any given problem; or, as Wikipedia puts it, "the belief that one is capable of performing in a certain manner to attain certain goals". This would, to some extent, be a useful concept for the "reflective learning" category, although like other items in that skill-set, it necessarily cuts across all the others. Indeed, I would suggest it's what TASH as a whole is trying to promote, primarily in learners but also in academic staff. So here's another phrase to add to our collective lexicon, and a helpful heuristic tool to understand better what we might already know how to do.

Update on the "seven sk/hills" framework

2008-07-25T11:19:00.005+01:00

Following last Thursday's meeting (pictured above), the TASH team have begun to re-consider the seven skills / seven hills framework we've previously outlined. The discussions and feedback from that meeting was really helpful in clarifying our thinking, and allowing the structure develop. What this means in detail is:

No matter how we divide up the particular academic skills students require for success at university, the final structure of the resource might look rather different - or to put this another way, the skills framework will be only one of several ways of navigating the resource. It won't be a closed, determining structure, but instead a means of helping the developers and users of the site think about what they're doing.
The structure of the site should usefully integrate with other frameworks significant within the University, most notably, the concept of the Sheffield Graduate. For example, it's clear that TASH has foregrounded the need for graduates to be able to "communicate effectively, orally, in writing or by other means as appropriate"; but has it equally emphasised their need to "recognise their responsibilities as active citizens"? This comparison and benchmarking process will be one of the priorities for the TASH team over the summer.
We also need to check out our perceptions of skills against other sources, in particular how other educational organisations carve them up (such as the Learning Areas outlined by the Learn Higher project), and against the perceptions of students. Again, these will be priorities in the next few months, and we're already working with CILASS and the Union of Students to maximise student involvement.
Finally, we picked up one specific point from the July 17th, about potential overlap between the "Problem solving and data handling" and "Analytical skills" categories. We are now now considering reconstructing them as "Research and data handling" and "Problem solving and analytical skills". This way, we hope to be able to draw a clearer distinction between different stages of a process whereby we move from defining the question/hypothesis, to designing a research/problem-solving strategy, to gathering the resources and data necessary to implement that strategy, to analysing and interpreting what the data suggests in answer to our real or constructed problem, and back again to consideration of what underpins different types of research questions and strategies to engage with them in the first place. This takes us back to point (1), that the final labels aren't that important - what matters is bringing in students and tutors in such a way that they can find everything they need.

So, to recap; our seven skills for the moment look like:

Academic literacy
Personal and interpersonal skills
Research and data-handling
Problem-solving and analytical skills
Written communication
Oral and other communication
Reflective learning

And we'll be running these past a range of other sources, and keeping them under constant review. Your contributions are essential to this process, so I'd welcome comments, feedback, and emails!

Reflective Learning Group

2008-07-23T11:26:00.002+01:00

Our group had very few resources to discuss. We speculated that this was the case because either (1) reflective learning is not valued very highly within the university and thus no resources have been designed to support and develop it or (2) that resources do exist but more time needs to be dedicated to finding them.

Reflective learning appears to be valued and is common practice in vocational disciplines such as Nursing, Medicine and Education.

Having 'reflective learners' appears to be the goal of many of the other academic subjects, in terms of having students who can think about their studies, evaluate what they have done and improve their work. However, how reflective learning could/should be encouraged/taught is unclear in these subjects.

Obstacles to reflective learning appeared to be:

Students not viewing it as having intrinsic value
It being a challenging process for students to carry out
A lack of resources to support it
Unsureness on the part of staff of how they can support students
A modular curriculum that does not encourage students to reflect on past work and progress towards future work.

Our view was that the TASH project could serve as a resource to help academics, who wished to improve their students reflective skills, to do so and also offer resources that students could engage with to help them 'get into a reflective mode of thinking.'

In addition to academic disciplines, the group felt that students could be supported and encouraged to become more reflective through PDP, Careers and The Sheffield Graduate programme.

I hope this covers most of what we talked about.

Induction process meeting

2008-07-22T18:01:00.002+01:00

Willy and I attended a helpful meeting about induction processes today, convened by Ana Symington of LeTS under the auspices of the Internationalisation project. The meeting brought together people interested in induction from across the university, and there was a strong continuity from previous groups that have explored this issue. The particular points that I remember being of possible relevance to TASH included:

Induction is a process not a period, and it is best thought of as a long and rich process, rather than trying to cram everything into the first week. (Speaking personally, one of the most revealing meetings I've ever attended was a Union of Students one about induction week social activities. In all seriousness, with the range of social activities open to students, it's no surprise that academic study is a long way down their agendas).
There's a need to be aware of peer group messages - the general perception is that L1 doesn't count per se, not just that it doesn't count towards the final degree. TASH is attempting to intervene on this cultural level, so one of the many reasons to get students involved ASAP is to develop sensitivity to these kinds of messages.
Timeliness of information is a key issue, with the suggestion, for example, that information about plagiarism and referencing is held off until the first assessment point. The reminder structure we've previously discussed could work here, and it'd be really nice if we could fit into the design of TASH some sort of calendar or link to relevant events.
One facet for the academic writing category is "Communication with staff", although this needs to be done sensitively, as clearly some academics care more than others, and the pedagogical / professional, rather than the personal, are clearly the strongest grounds for argument.

The group may well meet again, and future discussions will be recorded here and doubtless via other LeTS outlets as well. TASH clearly has a role to play in this "long induction process" model, and it was welcome to see the enthusiasm and awareness of all participants in the meeting for TASH, and their willingness to ensure it is directly considered in future discussions.

Personal and interpersonal skills group

2008-07-17T21:39:00.005+01:00

In our small groups session during the second TASH meeting we looked at a number of resources suggested in this category (rectangles only). Three general points emerged:

• All resources we came across in our group session were generic, i.e., dealing with life skills, communications skills, self-management skills. That these skills are also immediately relevant for somebody’s academic performance goes without saying. In fact, the line between personal skills and academic skills is often far from clear and we wondered whether it makes more sense to incorporate some resources under academic skills and creating a ‘life skills category’ to include for instance the support offered by the Counselling Service.
• Interpersonal skills are – unsurprisingly – above all associated with group activities, and are therefore less likely to be available as an online resource.
• The line between ‘practice’ and ‘resources’ was not always clear: we decided, as a quick definition, that a resource is a practice that is recorded and can therefore be shared.

Web resources:

http://dyslexstudyskills.group.shef.ac.uk
The resource is targeted at students with dyslexia but it is also a very good resource for less essay-savvy Level One students. Some good generic study skills info too.
http://www.compass.group.shef.ac.uk
A valuable resource, aimed at mature and adult learners in particular but it has a reassuring glow about it that could be good for Level One students too.
http://www.shef.ac.uk/counselling/services/skillsforlife
A general resource which probably is not particularly well-know among students who may associated the counselling service too much with ‘problems’ rather than with ‘life skills’ support. The Skills for Life programme is based on workshops and the courses run in small groups.
http://sheffield.ac.uk/counselling
Warmly recommended: the breathing exercise!

Other sources suggested:

Careers Service Employability RLO
We understood this to be Mole courses that could be adopted for a specific purpose. For instance, SOMLAL has adopted Claire Brooke’s Mole course on Work Placements and we are currently incorporating her work into a new SOMLAL Year Abroad Hub

Skill build Intensive Workshops offered by Enterprise at Sheffield, WRCETLE

Series of PowerPoint presentations and exemplars for developing understanding of Belbin team roles and implementing there roles in academic activities (Diane Rossiter and Catherine Biggs, CPE)

For something more immediate on Belbin, please try this link courtesy of Sabine Little.

Henriette Louwerse

First reflections from second TASH meeting

2008-07-17T20:32:00.004+01:00

Just going through my notes from this afternoon's meeting (here's the PowerPoint in case you missed it, and you can also download it from the widget on the left), and I wanted to set some things down while they were still current. Firstly, I felt it was a really positive meeting - lots of interesting and interested participants, and some critical discussions about what TASH will do and how it will do it. Secondly, I was very alert to the point about student involvement, and despite the current difficulties of a transition period between student union officers, CILASS SAN co-ordinators and the like, I think we need to at least scope out precisely how students will get involved while we have this bit of thinking time. Thirdly, the idea of mapping the seven sk/hills we've drafted onto other concepts such as the Sheffield Graduate seems really important, not least so (a) we have another route in to staff and student perceptions of the resource, and (b) we're not repeating work done by other LeTS institutional projects. And finally, the questions of structure we wanted to raise in this meeting were richly and intelligently responded to - thank you for all your contributions. The seven sk/hills structure is only one iteration of an ongoing project, and we will consider all your points about logical orders, the nuances of language, flexibility, multiple ways of using the resource, etc. It was really good to recognise such expertise in structuring student-facing resources in the room today, and we'll be certain to draw on it in the near future. Thanks again for an enjoyable and productive meeting, and stand by for many more future posts!

Pure Science Learning Advocates on Board!

2008-07-16T14:14:00.003+01:00

I had a very constructive meeting this lunchtime with the Learning Advocates (LAs) in Pure Science. Lots of useful suggestions were made about how TASH can move forward.

The LAs would like to see a resource that is generic but is 'tagged' in a discipline way.
All are keen to help embed the TASH project into their curriculum but feel that intro week is perhaps not the best time to launch it.
The LAs feel that demonstrations of the resource (either complete or in prototype format) would encourage other academics to buy into the resource.
It was suggested that the TASH project could become part of the induction projects or 'learning trails' that currently run in some departments.
All LAs are going to provide the project team with 5 skills they feel need addressing in their department, any resources they currently have available to develop independent learning and feedback on how TASH should be promoted in the University.

It was great to have so much enthusiasm and support for the project. Thanks.

Nick Fox, 15-7-08

2008-07-15T17:10:00.003+01:00

Nick is the director of teaching in ScHARR, and has led on the development of plagiarism resources for postgraduate students. These resources are enormously rich and well-structured, and provide students not with a bare argument that "plagiarism is unacceptable", but a much more substantial set of materials, including discussions of why plagiarism is unacceptable, what it might look like, and what to do about it. Nick's written about the resources for the Case Studies Wiki, and you can get more detail there; he's also working on a publication that explains his method in more depth, and explores some of the more fundamental questions that it raises.

Nick's straightforward and persuasive argument was that academics need to accept their measure of responsibility for student learning about plagiarism, and not assume that students will simply pick up good writing and referencing habits as they go on. Students are entering an academic culture that will be, to a greater or less extent, unfamiliar, and are bringing in skills and experiences that may not entirely fit with what is expected of them. Nick talked about, and TASH has borrowed, academic literacy, a general sense of knowing what is important in academic life and why; it is only through this deeper engagement with students that plagiarism will be ended, because otherwise we are treating the symptom (poor referencing) rather than the disease (lack of clarity around the academic writing process, and indeed in some areas of what is expected from university study per se).

This deeper engagement with students throws up many questions for academics about what their assumptions, roles, responsibilities, and own writing practices are, and starts to chisel away at some of the binary divisions sometimes found between active producers of knowledge (typically academics) and passive consumers (typically students). It would be ideal if TASH could provide one space for these discussions and explorations; I think the project team were already clear on the need for spaces for students to discuss issues around their shifting understanding of academic life and indeed their own identities, and one thing I've taken from the conversation with Nick is the importance of a similar space for academic staff. To be sure, we need to start explaining the rules of the game to students; but it might be that until we explain them, we won't recognise some of their tensions and ambiguities. This process of exploration and explanation is an essential part of becoming truly student-centred, and perhaps even experiencing some of the ambiguity and identity-shift that we aim, explicitly or otherwise, to encourage in students.

Laura Lane, post-16 qualifications officer

2008-07-08T13:32:00.002+01:00

Another very helpful meeting, this time with Laura, who has relatively recently been appointed to help the university get to grips with the new secondary qualifications structure, and in particular the new diplomas. Her task, as even this brief outline suggests, is pretty ambitious, especially as some details of the new structure are still being worked out. However, as one of the aims of the new structure is for consortia of HE, FE, and secondary institutions to work together, it's really good that TUOS has a voice in the ongoing discussions, and that we will be working more closely with local providers and colleagues.

There are also definite advantages to the diploma structure. For example, the extended project - "a level 3 qualification involving a single piece of work that requires a high degree of planning, preparation, research and independent working", sayeth the QCA - seems like an excellent preparation for higher education, and indeed a direct response to some popular concerns about the lack of independent study within the current A-level structure. There's also the
connections that can be potentially drawn between the "Personal, learning, and thinking skills" embedded within the diploma, and the skills HE is trying to develop, and TASH to foreground. I blogged a bit on this earlier. What I can add to that following the meeting with Laura is that these PLTS skills aren't being explicitly assessed, but are considered central to the new units as they are developed. Given that this development process is still underway, we'll have to see how it works out, and how the skills are structured within the diploma curricula; and how, in turn, they can be picked up and developed further within a HE context.

Chris Stokes, Dentistry

2008-07-07T18:40:00.004+01:00

Chris Stokes treated us to a whirlwind tour of the Dentistry building today, taking in the departmental lobster tank, sound-proofed web-servers, cow tissue reception units and the NHS on three separate floors. He also introduced us to a series of initiatives in Dentistry tailored to the academic and professional development of their UGs, highlighting several key areas where TASH can play a part. And to cap a very rewarding hour and a bit, he agreed to join TASH's core project team as our key link to the Faculty of Medicine.

Key areas of concern for Dentistry, he suggested, were as follows:

academic literacy/culture - as Chris put it to us, many UGs have little or no appreciation of what academics do other than for the one hour per week they stand up and lecture to them face-to-face ... understanding the context in which they are working is something that TASH can definitely help with;
personal/inter-personal development - UGs often good one to one with patients (something they are effectively screened for at interview) but less good at group work perhaps;
data handling - help with stats would be welcomed, particularly around UGs 4th year elective project when they get to go out into the wider world for a few months and consider what they find;
written, oral and other communication - not a lot of essay writing in Dentistry, but the need to develop a range of skills for communicating to very different audiences and, encouraged by the department's own range of online support and assessment, using a range of media too (including poster presentations, which we need to specifically add to the "other communication" strand); Dentistry is clearly a long way ahead of many departments in its use of wikis, podcasts and other media for assessment;
reflective learning - something UGs often struggle with, especially because they are so forward looking in terms of identifying and working towards the next set of tests/exams in a curriculum which is very closely structured - an area TASH might again help with, particularly in setting students up for their elective projects.

Chris shared a range of ideas around online media in particular, how to assess them, and how to make use of co-/ extra-curricular activities too (specifically the Dental Revue videos on YouTube). The fact that many dental students appear to favour/privilege visual learning style more than many other UGs was also an interesting theme which ran through many of our discussions. We look forward to exploring all of this and more with Chris over the coming months, as well as picking up on some unfinished conversations concerning the ADOPT scheme and pre-entry support.

Law and TASH

2008-07-07T18:15:00.004+01:00

Met this morning with Zoe Ollerenshaw in Law who lectures on the Legal Practice Course and is about to take up the roles of chair of the department's Teaching Quality committee and of teaching advocate across the department's full UG provision. Our conversation ranged over a wide range of skills areas of importance to Law UGs, students on the LPC, and PG students on a range of masters courses. Particular challenges mentioned, amongst others, were those encountered by second language overseas students on masters programmes, given the emphasis upon semantic meanings stressed in legal discourse (and for whom the department is developing compulsory sessions with ELTC); LPC students who, to an extent, have to "unlearn" some of the more fence sitting and discursive elements of UG writing conventions (in favour of some plain speaking advice to clients who wanted to know specific answers to specific questions); and the more general challenge of supporting the huge numbers of UG students throughout their studies given very high staff to student ratios.

There are clearly approaches TASH can learn from Law and LPC, including around the transition from UG to LPC and what this has to say about academic literacy .v. graduate professionalism, and writing (and being assessed) for/by different audiences. Likewise, Zoe sees that TASH and the 7 sk/hills currently outlined pretty much cover all the boxes Law will want to tick - and has the potential to assist greatly in developing a more coherent package of skills enhancement and reflective learning for UGs over the course of their studies.

Zoe is keen to remain involved, will be at the 17 July meeting, and will liaise with Tash Semmens and Norma Hird, both of whom are also closely involved in a "feedback taskforce" and other teaching initiatives within Law. Hopefully we'll be able to have at least one representative from Law at each of the meetings going forward.

LTEA2008: induction, treasure hunts and interactivity

2008-07-06T11:34:00.007+01:00

Before I forget, just wanted to post one or two random points arising from last week's LTEA conference.

In a session jointly hosted by colleagues from ACSE, Mech Eng. and HCS, a number of similar themes emerged around the importance of engaging students in pre-entry, induction week and follow-up activities which can help to foreground the importance of generic academic skills enhancement, the development of information literacy, and the acquisition of academic literacy in specific disciplinary contexts; and crucially to do this through active learning processes (rather than screeds of lectures and information sessions in large rooms). You can see the accompanying powerpoint here.

Something which all three departments seem to have introduced with positive results is the development of "learning trails" or "treasure hunts" to encouraged students to go out and find information and resources for themselves. This is also an activity I've used successfully with prospective students coming in to the University for taster sessions, and I wonder whether some kind of online quest might also be developed on TASH's site.

Further, Jen Rowson described an induction activity (a "design and build" task similar to a level one Mech Eng module) in which groups of students compete directly with one another to design something which will go the furthest, carry the most etc. etc. using limited materials. In the assessed module, grades are entirely dependent upon how well individual designs fare relative to other groups. To a lily-livered social scientist, this sounded a bit harsh, but as Jen notes it does closely mirror the reality of becoming a design engineer ("we might provide them with the tool box, but engineering is essentially about creative problem solving, and it's the most creative solution in the context of the brief which gets the contract", was something like how Jen put it) .

The element of competition (particularly when working as a group) seems often to engage students in very positive ways (and having assessed part of a module by group work this year for the first time, I have also seen the related benefits of peer-motivation in action). Again, Jen put it something like this: "show 'em the sky and invite them to reach for it" ... which I rather liked (even if it might also sound a bit cheesy if you're having a bad day).

So I wonder whether we might consider certain strategically targetted time-limited competitions for the hub - for example an online treasure hunt released via the hub in induction week with the best responses by week two earning a prize of some sort or another. Likewise, we could do similar things in and around other key transition areas - something to do with revision strategies released in the week before Xmas, time limited for entries in the first week of the new year; something in the first week of July targeted at students going from first to second or second to third year which gets them thinking about useful stuff to be thinking about and/or doing over the summer etc.?

The group I was in the induction session also turned to the issue of how to get students up and running most effectively at the beginning of their second year when suddenly grades really count (no longer enough simply to coast and scrape a pass), some of that study skills stuff from induction in year one might seem a bit rusty, and when additional pressures or challenges may be added by the move from halls of residence to private rented accommodation etc.

Getting students mentoring one another across levels was one obvious solution which is of course being supported and developed very effectively in a number of central support departments already, and is one which we've already batted about a bit in relation to TASH.

Finally, I had a conversation with Tash Semmens after the conference dinner (I think), the details of which are a little hazy - but revolved around our reminiscences of the central importance of law libraries in our own (increasingly distant) undergraduate studies ... and their relative lack of importance in many students minds today. One effect, Tash mused, of the increased accessibility of online sources in law today (but also many other disciplines, I have no doubt), is that students find it increasingly difficult to appreciate the distinction between primary, secondary and other sources, and their relative importance in the research and/or legal process. I very well remember myself that in the 1980s it wasn't difficult to spot whether you were dealing with statute law, common law, or text book opinion, because you found the books in different parts of the library and they all looked different, felt different and smelt different depending upon the type of source you were dealing with (and I'm sure this isn't simply the post-hoc rationalisation of a lawyer-turned-archaeologist more interested in law libraries as material culture than anything else these days). So the importance of getting students out and about, engaging with the very materiality of their individual disciplines, remains an important task which the treasure hunt can again achieve in part, I would suggest.

The new Diploma structure in post-16 education

2008-07-04T16:06:00.003+01:00

This is just to note something Laura Lane, the new post-16 qualifications officer in SRAM, sent around today. Laura was contacting the Engineering faculty to continue raising awareness about the changes to post-16 curricula, and develop the consultation process about shaping entry routes.

As we all know, one of the major changes coming is the new diploma scheme. You can get more information about diplomas here, and the particular point I wanted to draw out related to the "Personal, learning and thinking skills" that are embedded in the diploma. These are intended to develop learners as:

independent enquirers;
creative thinkers;
reflective learners;
team workers;
self-managers; and
effective participators.

(The list is taken from this bit of the QCA website). And as it stands, it isn't too far from our draft "Seven sk/hills" model, especially around the categories of reflection, team-working, and that bundle of higher-level skills around locating and using information.

So, at least two non-exclusive conclusions could follow. Firstly, lists of generic skills might be expected to cover similar topics. Secondly, the changes to post-16 curriculum might be developing pretty much the kinds of skills that we're wanting to support. Which is one clear positive from the curriculum changes.

Geography case study: embedding ELTC MOLE language tutorials

2008-07-04T08:51:00.005+01:00

I attended a very positive meeting yesterday with Richard Simpson, Alice Lawrence and Victor (sorry, Victor, I didn't catch your surname) - all from ELTC - Paul Wigfield (MOLE czar) and Steve Wise (Geography). Steve was the chief instigator and is concerned to address standards of written English amongst home undergraduate students in his dept. In particular, grammatical and other problems which recur and, it appears, are on the increase in many students' work.

It was helpful from a TASH perspective to observe in practice precisely the kind of process we hope to facilitate more easily through the medium of the tutor guides and other staff facing materials. Steve had only recently been put on to the ELTC online language tutorials (by Alice?) and, having now spent a limited amount of time perusing them, can see that many aspects of these provide ready made solutions to many of the areas he wishes to address with his students - hopefully the TFGs (tutor-facing guides) will help to shortcircuit this realisation for others in the future. Better still, Steve now plans to develop aspects of one of his first year modules to make more embedded use of these materials, and is considering supporting this through use of the first year tutorial system. He plans to develop a small amount of new material and possibly tinker with small aspects of the ELTC materials too (particularly to make the grammar tutorials and/or the way the subject of grammar is approached much less technical - since the ELTC materials were originally developed with a second language audience in mind), and is willing to work with TASH to use this as a disciplinary case study to illustrate how more generic materials can be made to work effectively in subject specific contexts.

Particular outcomes then:

Steve to work on tailored UG "Writing for Geographers" materials using ELTC tutorials as a key component, and to share lessons learned with TASH; it would be good if we can find someone on 17 July to do something similar for PG writing and/or in the pure sciences too;
Alice and Victor to work on TASH TFGs in relation to the ELTC online tutorials - we may want to break these down into guides addressing the needs of first- and second-language students respectively;
Richard, who knows the back history of the ELTC resources, is happy for these to be shared more widely via MOLE (e.g. the plan is for all 1st year Geog UGs to have automatic access next acad year, rather than having to sign up to be enrolled), and in principle (as Lynn Parker has also hinted for the library info tutorials) is happy for some or more of the tutorials to be lifted out of MOLE and made more easily available via web pages;
Paul has confirmed it should not be a big technical task to take tutorials such of these out of MOLE and place them onto open web pages if this seems to be the most effective way forward as the project progresses (the main issue for TASH here being that we want to signpost people as accurately as possible ... but if pointing to a MOLE resource, can only do so to the front page and not link any deeper to specific elements of a tutorial or resource);
TASH will support Steve, Alice and Victor with development time etc. as appropriate, and may also be able to help facilitate some student focus group work around the materials Steve plans to develop (e.g. using our links with the CILASS-SAN and union education officer);
We need to have a word with Diana Ward (ELTC), who will be working with English Lit next year (Bob McKay, Brendan Stone?) on some first year language development support.

Steve, Alice and hopefully Victor will all be at 17 July meeting where we can begin to put some of these pieces alongside other disciplinary and faculty case study priorities. Thanks to all for a very productive 45 minutes.

Key academic skills - seven skills for seven hills

2008-07-01T19:23:00.006+01:00

Tim and I met this morning to review the outcomes of last Tuesday's launch meeting and to look forward to the next event on Thursday 17 July. One important task was to consider and feedback on the different group responses to our invitation to outline the three most important academic skills which students need to develop at University. The raw outputs will, all being well, be uploaded to the Generic Skills website later this week and we will be circulating an email shortly thereafter. In the meantime, we wanted to share our particular - and undoubtedly preliminary - take on what has already emerged from this exercise. We will also be using this as one starting point for discussions and resource sharing on 17th.

The picture is of my rough summation of our tentative discussions, uploaded via the wonders of CILASS copycam technology. The grid in the top right hand corner will be explicated, we hope, on 17th.

We are presently suggesting seven key skills areas (in line with the seven hills theme which Claire Shanks has mentioned and which fits with the idea of using understanding/analysing Sheffield as one possible theme for the hub - but also some fit here with the SCONUL pillars and certain other possibilities too):

academic literacy (understanding academic cultures, as raised by Nick Fox in discussions on 24th, including referencing, time management, induction and awareness of changes at different levels);
personal and inter-personal skills (including self-organisation, self-motivation, working in groups and confidence building);
problem solving and data handling (including qualitative and quantitative research methods, statistics etc.);
analytical skills (which we hope need no explication here - though clearly they will on the hub);
written communication (in its many different forms - including consideration of writing for different purposes and different audiences);
oral and other communication (including multi-media presentations, poster presentations, and online literacies);
reflective learning (including developing self-awareness of where you are, where you need to be, and what strategies may work best for you to get from one to the other).

Two terms which appeared in one or more of the group offerings, and on the image above, but which we have for now chosen not to reproduce in the list above, are "information literacy" and "resourcefulness". In the case of the former, we are currently arguing that this is a term which cross-cuts many of the sk/hills delineated above, but is not perhaps broad enough to encompass all the social aspects of learning which must also form a key element of the hub more generally. In this respect also, there may be something about the latter term which implies an inner resilience, and willingness to explore and work with resources - however plentiful or limited - which can be argued to be one particular hallmark of a genuinely autonomous learner, but which is as much perhaps about personal development as about academic skills per se. And whilst we want to continue to foreground the idea of academic skills for the moment, we are also entirely mindful of the indivisibility of academic skills development and enhancement from social and personal development within and beyond each individual student's time at University.

It can be taken as read, therefore, that these are both terms which offer important background contexts to the specific skills set we outline above - and that the "meta-skills approach" favoured by one group, and perhaps showing the clearest connection to many of the discussions we understand to have taken place in the Generic Skills Working Group in the past, is by no means excluded from TASH's developing vision. Nevertheless, we remain mindful of the fact that the hub must, first and foremost, be seen to assist individual students and their departments to achieve the best degree results they can - whilst recognising the crucial importance of extra- and co-curricular activities and support mechanisms in aiding this process.

We anticipate that we will return to debates around these and similar issues again and again over the coming months - we also hope we'll find some time to do some extra-curricular reading of our own relatively shortly to check our developing understanding against the broader skills literature.

Feedback on TASH meeting with CILASS

2008-07-01T19:20:00.003+01:00

This lunchtime, Willy and I did a little presentation to CILASS staff about TASH. The genesis of this was the interest shown by CILASS in the project, but the clash of the June 24th launch meeting with an important internal CILASS event; so to maximise efficiency, we thought we'd talk to the half-dozen or so key members of CILASS staff together. You can find the slideshow we used here, although it's pretty much the same one that we used on the 24th, which is available from the LeTS pages.

The meeting was very helpful, with the interest shown by staff growing stronger the more they learned about TASH. In particular, they were excited by the possibility of student contributions to the resource, and pointed to their developing series of student guides (for instance, this one on groupwork). As TASH develops, CILASS are happy to help align these guides with the project and the topics it covers, leading to a really strong student voice, and some peer-support which, as I think we all recognise, can be a very powerful mechanism. CILASS were also keen to foreground the notion of Information Literacy as a way of tying together and supporting some of the topics that TASH will cover, and I agree this is a very helpful framework; it provides a structure in which learners can locate their skills development and progress, and an explanatory framework for what they're doing. It is also an obvious link with the Library's Information Skills tutorials, which have always been one of the main drivers behind TASH. And finally, in the kind of creative and free-flowing discussion that CILASS staff are so good at facilitating, we reached the idea of possibly TASH fitting into a "learning commons", providing students with a series of tools to further and perspectives to deepen their learning. If it could achieve this, that would be great; and the main message I took away from the meeting was how CILASS has already done much of the groundwork for such an ambitious project.

More on the Pure Science group, 24 Jun meeting

2008-07-01T17:46:00.004+01:00

Just to build on Kath's posting here, and speaking from a social scientist's outsider perspective, I was struck by how the conversation quickly focussed in on the importance for science students to develop "soft skills" - how to engage in and implement group work projects effectively, how to develop oral and poster presentation skills etc. - alongside more bread and butter (perhaps) lab and report writing skills.

As Kath observes, the importance of embedding the resource within departmental consciousness, and of making as much of it clearly relevant to specific disciplinary contexts, was a key theme - and the tension between generic and discipline specific, small light hubs and extensive resource pools, and the chicken and egg of getting the hub up and running, and individual disciplines recognising the opportunities it can provide and developing new or adapting existing resources to feed in/out of TASH.

It was also suggested that the motivation of some students may be a little different today from in the past - to wit, more students were interested in the degree they were working towards than in the specific subject they were taking. It would be interesting to hear whether this is a view shared by colleagues across the faculty.

The possibility of lifting some of the existing library info skills resources out of MOLE and making them more easily accessible in an open source .html form was also floated by Lyn Parker - and offers some exciting possibilities for TASH. We will certainly be following up on this one. Lyn also mentioned some of the materials students have been developing with CILASS in terms of "how to do (IBL) research" etc. Tim and I met with a number of the CILASS core team today and Tim will be blogging this separately - but it is already clear that CILASS will be able to help in a number of ways - and thanks here to Laura Jenkins also, whose final official act as the SAN co-ordinator (before her extended swansong at the LTEA conference), must surely have been to come along to the TASH launch itself. We look forward to working closely with her successor, Natalie Whelan, and others in the student ambassador network, over the summer and into next academic year.

Finally, Patrice Panella's Innovative Communications project was mentioned as one place where student led engagement with Web 2.0 technologies is being explored - there may be important lessons for TASH to draw from this work when we start to consider the nature of the interface we will be developing in more detail.

a thought from the LTEA (Inquiry in a networked world) conference

2008-06-27T15:24:00.004+01:00

A very short snippet from me:
The LTEA conference this week was a rich source of ideas for TASH. One that particularly struck me was how well the TASH resource will work with the "Student as Scholar" ethos, helping students to have the right skills to "seek out new knowledge", and developing student confidence in those skills. These were just two of the aspirations (there were many more) raised up by David Hodge in his Plenary talk.

Feedback from Faculty of Science and Medicine

2008-06-26T20:53:00.004+01:00

Willy and I amalgamated our groups (primarily because there were no medics at the meeting). I'll pop down the points I recall but feel free to chip in, Willy!

As with the other faculties there appears to be a desire to embed the resource into the curriculum somehow.
Resources should be both specific and generic-i.e. as well as generic resources to help students develop good grammar and syntax there could also be resources such as a guide to writing a lab report.
For students and staff to value the resource there needs to be some clear discipline relevance-it was therefore proposed that perhaps each department should make a list of say 5 resources they would like their students to have available to them.
Chris Stokes and Julian Burton were highlighted as key staff to speak to in the Faculty of Medicine.
There was also a valuable suggestion that we should get the Medical Soceity on board for some student input.
The Learning Advocates in Pure Science are a group that meets regularly and has disseminated many excellent resources to develop independent learning in students and therefore are worth contacting.
Ed Warminski and Kath Linehan have offered several resources for the project which should be relevant to students/staff in Pure Science and Medicine.

Signposting image

2008-06-25T17:35:00.003+01:00

Created by Jen Rowson. I think it's fab. She'll do a tidier version if we require it.

Feedback from the Engineering Group at the 24th June TASH event

2008-06-25T11:57:00.004+01:00

Feedback from the Engineering Group:

Group membership: Plato Kapranos (Materials Eng), Juliet Wilson (plagiarism working group ) , Jen Rowson (Mech Eng), Tom O’Brien (student – Biomedical Engineering) , Alice Lawrence (ELTC), Linda Gray (ACSE)

Priorities/ what does Engineering need from TASH:

Lab reports – how to write. (Please note that Tom O’Brien is writing a guide. Also Jen Rowson (Mech Eng) has a guide - see below)
Observing that engineering students have lots of contact time early on, and that therefore engineering students appear to expect that all work must be done in contact time. Engineering departments want to move students on from much contact time/little independent work to little contact time/much independent work as their academic career progresses. To do this, one priority is to encourage student skill acquisition in information gathering and to get students to buy into doing this information gathering.
Referencing – with a real need for consistency within departments and across departments. At the moment students are either told to use one method for one piece of work and another method for another, or they aren’t given a specific system to use at all.
Helping students relate criteria used in assessment to examples of real work. Helping students understand how different assessment criteria reflect developmental stages.
Helping to show students how they are expected to develop through their academic careers.

Resources already available:

ELTC resources – online and face-to-face
Library’s ISR , in which there is a specific Engineering hub (which ACSE contributed to)
MATLAB tutorials – several available in University, and Tom is writing another MATLAB tutorial
JAR’s (Anthony Rossiter's) animations on MOLE for systems related to modelling electrical circuits. JAR’s simulations on MOLE for pendulum and particle3D.
MASH material – extensive support for Maths
MECH eng has guides to
o Writing lab reports
o Literature reviews
o Referencing
o Plagiarism
ACSE and AERO have material for educating about plagiarism and collusion, which has also been adopted by the Uni plagiarism working group
Peter Judd (EEE) has developed some animations to support teaching the C programming language

How could TASH be used in departments:

Linked to from student portal - with noticeable pop-up or other attention getting icon.
Buy-in by lecturing staff, to include mention of during lectures/assignment descriptions. If appropriate could also demonstrate interaction with TASH during lectures
Personal tutors – could devote personal tutorial session to showing tutees material on TASH
Perhaps don’t talk about TASH much in induction, because of the information overload problem.
“Foreground expectations” – repeatedly make it clear that lecturers intend students to use the TASH resource.
Weekly calendar reminding students of academic schedule (specific to department), with mention of relevant material in TASH for the current assignment/task

Challenges for the TASH project:

Making it specific enough for individual students
Every department will want different things from it
Finding material that is already available
Embedding into the subject discipline, because TASH type material is not of itself interesting. For this reason a large example set for subject specific tutors will be necessary.
Making resources available to allow students to catch up to already assumed levels. (This is a particular issue in the service-module oriented engineering faculty).
Overseas students (of which the engineering faculty has a large number) – may be overwhelmed by visual information if their English language skills are weak, so the design needs to carefully limit the information on the page without being too simplistic therefore patronising.
Overseas students’ previous experience of using IT will vary depending on country.

Feedback from the Arts focus group

2008-06-24T21:26:00.003+01:00

The group discussing TASH from the Arts faculty was nothing if not eclectic, with only one bona fide academic from the faculty, and a range of other central services staff and fellow-travellers. However, what they said about TASH was extremely helpful, and a really good exploration of many of the key issues. Here is, in rough form, a report of their conversations.

Students are coming from a wide range of learning backgrounds, and A-level marks aren't always a good way of identifying their strengths and weaknesses. There is also the student perspective - they've done well to get this far, and aren't always (or initially) receptive to the message that they need to change what they do. The consequent need to recognise the diversity of their backgrounds and skills was therefore emphasised, especially given the pluralisation of post-16 routes. It was also underscored that the skills they have been rewarded for in secondary education may not be the same as those they'll need in higher education, and that this could be one of the moments of difficult identity transition that Alice Lawrence referred to in the first discussion.
It was strongly suggested that TASH should be a standard route for all students, without identification of special needs or shortcomings. However, one incidental good of TASH could be to provide a way to support students currently slipping between the cracks in current support provision - for example, students who display characteristics of dyslexia, but who have not received a diagnosis. This is particularly common with ESOL learners, where the distinction between second language difficulties and other learning difficulties is technically impossible to make.
TASH needs to be promoted to students throughout their learning journeys. The key points this group identified were pre-arrival, helping them clarify their expectations of what HE will be about; and at the start of Level Two, where again there may be a shift in expectations, and other interfering sociological and cultural factors distracting them from study. It was also suggested that TASH should somehow be structured to promote recurrent engagement - it should be ok, and indeed positively encouraged, to go over the same thing several times. PGT students also need to be included within TASH, and thought given as to how material might need to be presented differently for them than to other groups.
One particular skills need of Arts students was around constructing a good essay, and this, as with the language of the earlier discussion, was cast in terms of recognising what skills were required, and how they might be different to what they've done in school (for example, critically engaging with material rather than repeating it by rote). It was also suggested (picking up on earlier discussions about modularisation) that the links between skills and modules needed to be emphasised, and how they could carry their learning from unit to unit, and ultimately into the big wide world.
It was recognised that TASH was ambitious, and the quite correct question was asked of are we trying to do too much? Working with our current timescale, what are the achievable outcomes? What is our fall-back plan if we don't achieve all of these? A very good question, and again something that should be borne in mind throughout the development process.

General feedback from the first TASH event

2008-06-24T21:09:00.009+01:00

This is just to reflect back my experience of the event, and share some of the key points of the discussions. Overall impressions of the event were extremely positive - there was a lot of interest from staff and a high level of engagement throughout. A number of useful resources (in terms of people, materials, ideas, and general goodwill) were identified throughout the afternoon, and I am optimistic that these will be followed up by email and personal contacts in the next few weeks.

There were a number of issues that cut through the day, and questions that pertain to them, and I've tried to separate out some of them below. The big one I'm left with came up in several guises - namely, what is the relation between the staff- and student-facing sides of the project? We clearly need to say different things to each constituency, so how do we structure this, and ensure engagement on both sides? The image I stumbled on in discussion was of a Venn diagram, with an overlapping core but different edges, and by implication, ways into that core. It's right that the precise answer to the question won't emerge until later on in the design process, and it's also right that we keep it in mind throughout these early stages, shaping our response as we go along.

Picked out in rough order of importance (and too much detail - blog posts are meant to be short) are some themes that came up throughout the day, in small and whole group discussions.

Student engagement. This was the most commonly-identified issue. Nick Fox helpfully intervened with the suggestion that before we start engaging students with the development of specific skills, we need to first persuade them of the benefits - they need to recognise that there is a culture in higher education that they need to adapt to, and that their academic achievements will ultimately be closely linked to the level of success of their integration. This culture is, as Willy responded, embedded in practices and lived experiences, which is precisely where TASH needs to be - in induction processes, assessment feedback, Union links, Student Services support, and so on. The academic lifestyle is a performance, and TASH can help (1) foreground this performative element, and (2) support students in developing their own performance. Nick's useful phrasing was that we need to promote academic literacy, and this begins with spelling out that this will be different to what they've done and been good at in school (or other non-HE contexts). Nadine indicated the success of the Inclusive Learning and Teaching project, and how this had been attributed to its emphasis on student involvement; she even suggested student champions for the resource, embedded in departments, and perhaps financially rewarded (or maybe given credit through the Sheffield Graduate award) for actively promoting the resource amongst students.

Tutor engagement. Feelings on this were largely positive, with one participant reporting discussions at Faculty level, calling for exactly this kind of thing. There were, however, outstanding questions about engaging certain tutors who were so embedded in their disciplinary context that the value of generic material would be difficult to communicate.
This might shift the focus of the promotion of the resource onto what has worked thus far - local, personalised approaches, explaining the benefits and taking time to work through anxieties and misunderstandings. The second element to this was the fact that the deficit model of student skills is probably one of the more commonly-held ones for academics, so while we want to move away from that in all we say and do, we should still be prepared to address it amongst academic colleagues.

“Soft skills”. Alice Lawrence noted how HE study was a period of identity transition for students, and that we should be mindful and supportive of this frequently difficult process. This got me thinking about an issue that Debora Green raised, namely the generic skills materials that were on the fringes of TASH, and that she didn't want to be lost. Her example was the Counselling Service's Life Skills materials, which are indeed great, and would benefit all students coming to university. Another question on the already long list might be to what extent TASH wants to signpost resources for the personal development aspects of HE - it's not subject-specific, yet a different kind of generic skill to something like time management. The phrase “soft skills” was used by some Engineering and Science colleagues, and included many of the critical thinking, groupwork, communication, and motivational skills explored during the first exercise. Is this a phrase we want to add to the lexicon, and what would be some of the consequences of that? To come at this another way, is a clearer definition of “skills” required? In the first group exercise, there were clearly different levels being discussed, and how we define this term might help restrict or control the shape of the resource. There's doubtless an academic literature on this, and I'm becoming more and more aware (through a whole range of conversations at the event) that we might want to do this reading sooner rather than later.

Embedding the resource. The feeling of participants overall was that the resource would have greatest utility and force embedded in particular departmental structures, modules, and perhaps even assessment. Students and staff would both welcome (perhaps mainly at Level One) an immediate link with the subject area; they both might be willing to explore later on in their learning journeys, but there should be a familiar starting-point. The idea of centring the interactive self-reflection exercises around Sheffield received a double boost in the Arts group that I was facilitating. Firstly, Stephanie Pitts says she does something similar with new postgraduate students, asking them to produce an index of musical events across Sheffield - this sharpens their research skills, provides a useful product, and allows them to learn a little more about the city. Secondly, Claire Shanks showed our group some work the Generic Skills group had previously done (and which I wonder, Willy, if it's in the folder Margaret gave you). This consisted of “seven hills” of generic skills (can't remember what they were), which they'd considered as a possible basis for a generic skills website. This will be an excellent source when we come to considering in more detail the student-facing activities, and once again proves there's little new under the sun.

There are doubtless more to run with, but that's enough for now. A good discussion, and initial sharing of ideas and perspectives, and it bodes well for future project events.

Getting Started: introductory meeting - Social Sciences

2008-06-24T18:23:00.004+01:00

This afternoon Tim and Willy hosted the launch event for the hub project. Some reflections on the event as a whole will follow soon, but for now I wanted to share some discussion points from our second activity. For this part of the session we split up into faculty groups and Alan Philips (Student Services), Richard Ward (LeTS) and I became honorary Social Science bods, along with Steve Wise (Geography) who is the ‘real thing’!

1. Topics that would like MASH to cover
The top priority (for Geography) is writing skills for ‘home’ students, from grammar through to how to structure and present a coherent argument (no pressure on me then for the rest of this posting).

In terms of existing resources, the department has looked at materials produced by the ELTC. Whilst these are excellent, they have largely been produced for an ESL audience, so they require some modification to make them suitable. The Royal Literary Fund (RLF) has also produced material designed for HE level study that we should explore further. In addition, the RLF writing fellow based in Animal and Plant Sciences has highlighted the benefits of 1-1 support and advice. With this in mind, we agreed that it will be worth exploring peer support, e.g. level 3 students working with level 1, as part of the TASH project.

There was a consensus in the group that in order to be effective, the resources need to be contextual. Therefore role of TASH should be to provide generic material and examples that departments can adapt to meet their own requirements.

2. Challenges
Student expectations and engagement -the student survey highlighted a gap between what departments offer/deliver and what students recognise has been provided. We discussed how this relates to the process of learning and reflection – how can we better support students in developing the critical self reflection skills that can help them to process and evaluate what they have learned and translate this into what they need to do next?

Related to this, we also considered what motivates students to engage with academic skills development. Whilst ‘getting a better degree’ has some appeal, we also agreed that employability and transferable skills are often of equal, or higher, significance. In both instances, we agreed that peer perspectives can be as or more powerful than those of tutors, and it could be useful to have some level 3 or recent graduate perspectives on ‘what I wish I’d known’. In addition, whatever the format or mode we use to provide skills development, we need to recognise that the relevance and importance attached will vary from student to student, and with this in mind, it is important that there is a resource /resources that enable students to revisit things at a time that works for them.

Designing materials that suit student and tutor requirements – it would be great to have parallel access points for tutors and students, but given the previous points it will be a challenge to design generic materials for students that can augment or serve as a prompt to go back to any materials or activities that were provided by their department/s. However, if (or should that be when) we can get this right , it will be a real strength.

In terms of contributing to the TASH project, Steve noted that he would like to work on 'writing skills' in collaboration with the ELTC and LeTS, with a view to sharing materials via the Hub.

Learning Hub in Jessop's Edwardian Wing?

2008-06-21T15:26:00.003+01:00

Last Tuesday 17 June, together with colleagues from ELTC, MASH, MLTC, LeTS and Estates, I attended a meeting chaired by Paul White at which he outlined the back-history and proposed future of the Learning Hub Project. Originally conceived as a new build, the present plan is now to pitch for money and space in the Edwardian Wing of Jessops hospital (the bit sandwiched between Broad Lane and the original Victorian hospital building on Leavygreave Rd which is destined to be inhabited by the Music Dept).

If the funds are secured, the renovation of the Grade 2 listed building and addition of a smaller new build to the east/north-east is proposed to result in the creation of at least four key spaces (working from memory as my notes are presently elsewhere):

A fancy new build entrance and executive teaching area for CPD and other industry-standard events off to the right (more specifically, a "Harvard style lecture theatre"; though I'm yet to establish exactly what that might mean);
On the ground floor of the Edwardian Wing, one or two large open access areas currently conceived as communal spaces for students and others to gather, work individually or in groups, have access to certain specialist IT packages etc. which cannot be provided across campus for licencing reasons (e.g. some of the mindmapping, maths & stats software, and perhaps some more specific software required by PG students in partic. disciplines - may be fancy GIS packages for example?); this could be an ideal space for the development of self-help study groups, and for projects like TASH, MASH and the Sheffield Graduate Award to have permanent display areas in which to provide physical access to study and support materials and resources of one form or another;
On the middle floor, 4-6 seminar rooms (min. capacity 24), plus a few small breakout rooms for one-2-one tutorials etc., plus specialist language labs; the teaching rooms would be pooled, probably with first dibs for MASH, ELTC and MLTC, and the possibility that they could also be open to TILL classes in the evenings;
On the top (attic) floor, office space for MASH, ELTC and MLTC staff.

Volunteers for an "advisory group" were sought, and I have now put my name forward as the TASH link person for the time being. If this development comes off, it will provide an important and much more coherent physical presence for many of the face-to-face skills enhancement services already offered across the institution ... and it also has the potential to provide a physical form to the TASH self-help, self-analysis, easy-access philosophy. In terms of time-frames, if we are very lucky and the money doesn't go elsewhere then we'd be looking at a facility opening on the site in autumn 2010.

As with the discussion of labels below, however, it is essential that this building is seen as a hub for all, at all stages of their learning careers, and not a triage station for learners who don't quite fit the norm ... I'm confident that this is an obstacle that can be surmounted - but that the key is likely to be getting the ground floor right. The fact that Paul White has pulled TASH in at such an early stage in our existence is also very welcome and indicative of the role we may be able to play in helping to lend a little more coherence to the many very valuable services and resources that currently exist scattered across campus, not just online but in the real world too.

Magic muffins

2008-06-19T22:37:00.002+01:00

Thanks, Kath, for your post here, and your participation in the numerous other bits of technology thrown your way today - your enthusiasm is much appreciated! I also welcome your role as "devil's advocate" in some of today's discussions, especially as it is grounded in your own experience, given the need we will have to justify TASH as different to the other university resources and schemes. We are, as I think came out of today's discussion, operating in a crowded market, with a superfluity of demands on staff and student time. If TASH is to succeed, it needs to be clearly established as something that will make everyone's life easier, and that the time-cost of engaging with it will be rapidly outweighed by the benefits.

There were some other specific bits of learning about the project that I wanted to ensure we kept hold of. In no particular order these are:

We need to promote the resource at various points of the academic year - for example, before and during Intro Week; before key assessment points and after feedback; at transition points, where the student may be moving into unfamiliar territory, and might be unclear of the changed rules of the game. All of this will require (1) subtle and variegated design, and (2) an embedding of the resource in staff and student consciousness so that it becomes the natural place to go in moments of dislocation.
The transferability of skills or indeed knowledge is a particularly pertinent issue under a modularised system, and something that could be worth highlighting in the resource. Much as Linda described in the ACSE Level One curriculum, we would do well to highlight the moments where students need to pick up the stuff they did in a previous place, and apply it somewhere new. After all (and this is my particular hobby-horse) as wide-awake intelligent independent adults, they can already do loads of stuff that will help them in academic life. They just need to be enabled to do this, and given the time and space to carry out the often difficult personal work it requires.
One potential vehicle to achieve both these points is to make readily-available connections between TASH and PDP. We're trying to jump between moving vehicles here, as both projects are in various states of change, but PDP is an already-existing structure for staff-student conversations about skills, and as such, could be an excellent moment to engage with TASH.
There might well be resources within the Research Training Programme that would benefit L3 learners engaged on independent study. The more generic point to draw from this is that appropriate resources for supporting learning might exist in surprising places across the institution.

Some time ago, Willy posed the question of whether inquiry-based learning was a treasure hunt or a voyage of discovery - are the students finding what you've already planted there, or genuinely discovering new things for everyone (even if they're initially mis-identified, etc.)? This TASH project would seem firmly to be a voyage of discovery, and as such, is likely to be thrilling, disappointing, frustrating, and, erm, splashy by turns. We know what we'd like to find, but we don't know quite where it is; and we're expecting to find other things along the way. The trick will be, to tie together what is rapidly becoming a ramble, to balance this open-ended discovery ethos, with the time-efficiency driver I indicated at the start. Whatever it is we end up with, we need to know that it works, and be able to persuade others of this fact. Given the general goodwill shown towards the project thus far, and the commitment and enthusiasm of the core team evident today, I think we're well-placed to achieve this.

Bouncing bean!

2008-06-19T13:01:00.006+01:00

Thought the meeting this morning was very inspiring. Bounced back to my office full of beans and a list of things to do (Tim what did you put in the muffins again?) Forgive my perchant for playing devil's advocate regarding the project. I'm just very keen to see it succeed and therefore like to make sure 'we' are prepared for any obstacles we are likely to face. My experience of previous instituitional initiatives is that they are excellent but can quickly get lost in the day-to-day teaching in departments. My 'negative' perspectives are only a consequence of some of the rebuffs I've faced trying to incorporate independent learning into teaching in my department. I don't want the same ill fate to befall TASH.

Responses from announce message

2008-06-12T19:26:00.001+01:00

Having successfully emailed the whole university, without any Ronald Reagan-style gaffes, it's nice to sit back now and think a little about the responses we've had. Let's start with the fact there's been a lot of interest - at close of play today, 22 positive responses, from 15 different departments. What's been particularly nice is the spread of interest, from students to early-career academics to bigwigs to support staff and learning development colleagues; it seems that everyone's interested in this, and has something to contribute. Secondly, there's been an offering-up of ideas, materials, prospective projects, and talents already, which is pleasing, given the collaborative intention of the project. And thirdly, those who have responded have often emphasised the things Willy and I have talked about between ourselves, such as the importance of ensuring key skills, the language of enhancement and development rather than deficiency and remedy, and the necessity of the overall project. No matter how many people email in response, and/or come along on June 24th, the announce email has helped launch the project publicly, and foster a certain degree of awareness. This may make knocking on doors to find out what people are doing, and what they want to do - almost certainly one of the next steps in the project development - easier, and even more rewarding.

And lastly, two other great things have happened this week, namely the confirmation of Kath Linehan and Linda Gray as members of the core project team. TASH will be all the better for your contribution, and I look forward very much to working with you!

Brief feedback from CiCS session on new technologies in learning and teaching

2008-06-05T17:43:00.005+01:00

This was a session organised by Chris Attwell, of the Innovative Communications group, to bring together people interested in using new technologies to support learning and teaching. The primary focus was on blogs and wikis, although clearly went much further, and there was a good range of opinion represented. While I was, by a country mile, the least geeky person in the room, it was great to hear exchanges of knowledge and experiences, and picking up of useful tips; for example, that you can get RSS feeds from blogs into MOLE (through the Media Library, maybe; it seemed such an obvious thing that no-one else required detailed explanation). There were also debates about aligning the technology not just with forms of assessment, but with assessment criteria within that; one thing that has proved successful in some contexts is having participation as a criterion, rather than explicitly judging the content of their contributions. This creates a good atmosphere for sharing ideas and getting discussion going, which in turn leads to higher-level contributions elsewhere in the teaching.

The thing that wasn't quite the elephant in the room - it was mentioned, but not explored in anywhere enough detail - was finding the why of these technologies. What would they add to teaching and learning that couldn't be achieved by other means? This is certainly a question to address with TASH, and maybe foreground in early project team discussions. We're not looking at technologies anywhere near as fancy as some of those discussed today, but to ensure the widest possible engagement from staff (in particular) and students, we need to explain why the technology is necessary, not just what it will do.

Class and learning skills labels

2008-06-02T18:08:00.002+01:00

I just wanted to record and ponder on one of the observations made by Harriet and Frances in today's very productive meeting - namely, the role of social background in students' interpretations of being identified as dyslexic. It has been noted that students from a middle-class background may welcome this term, and emphasise the positive aspects (being creative, being "a bit different") and incorporate it within their overall student identity, other students may resist it, and see it as a definition of disability or impairment. If there was a simple solution to overcoming this resistance to the term, I suspect someone else would have found it by now; and I'd welcome thoughts prompted by literature such as that referenced below. The extent of my pondering on the subject is that it could be worth highlighting this range of reactions in any phrasing that we use around dyslexia - "Some people find that being diagnosed with dyslexia is very dispiriting, and seems to label them as inadequate. Others find it a helpful explanation for difficulties they've experienced throughout their life, and a positive influence on their identity as a learner", or somesuch. Riding my particular hobby-horse, it might be that some of the student input into the design of the resource could be gathering testimony on this issue of being identified as having specific learning needs - how has it affected their studies? The rest of their student life? What has the impact been on their sense of personal identity? etc. etc. This might be opening up the concept of student input somewhat more broadly than we've previously discussed, so it's only a suggestion; but potentially, it could provide a helpful means to facilitate student engagement with the resource.

Quick feedback from Inclusive Learning and Teaching events as part of Good Practice Week

2008-05-28T19:58:00.003+01:00

I went to a session on Inclusive Learning and Teaching today that was a front for a number of different workshops on various aspects of the project. The over-riding message of the day was that practices for inclusivity were also practices for high quality teaching and learning, and that small adjustments made to benefit one group of students would usually also benefit others. Elena described pitching ILT to departments as a way of helping them meet the aims of the University's LTAS and Sheffield Graduate characteristics, and this seems to have worked, helping raise awareness of issues and engaging with a wide range of departments. It could be worth adopting a similar strategy when discussing TASH.

Elena also fed back on an event in April where students had outlined what they saw as do's and don'ts of inclusive teaching (on a handout in the pack - suspect you've seen it already); the detail of these was as interesting as the more creative work they'd done, suggesting metaphors for the ILT project. They talked of "isolated islands" of students wanting to cross the sea (with support) and come together under the sun of ILT; and of there being certain ILT-based keys to unlocking the box of their award and learning. This last in particular deserves some unpacking, as while it has strongly teleological undertones, it does strike a nice balance between supporting students and allowing them to develop their own ideas.

The other prevalent theme of the sessions was lecturer assumptions , especially in the guise of cultural or linguistic references not everyone could follow. There was one student who had felt excluded from a module by being on a joint honours programme and not understanding the references to previous modules that single honours students had done. Again, this could be one way in with TASH, and certainly provides another aspect to the continuing problematisation of student and tutor expectations. Ali Hayward said nice things about TILL and the support she'd received, and emphasised the importance of a holistic understanding of the student, not seeing them as disabled, foreign, etc. but as a whole person, with a whole person's needs. Again, potential material for use here.

On another note, as a passing remark at the end, Margaret Freeman mentioned that HCS were considering offering tandem learning sessions for English pronunciation, which could be of great benefit to some of our learners. It would be really interesting if this took off, and might help integrate some of our students with other departments and the general life of the university.

Nadine and Louise

2008-05-23T16:18:00.003+01:00

Two very helpful conversations, one face-to-face with Nadine, one by telephone with Louise. Both gave us great tips for developing and embedding the resource, and we're very well-positioned to move on with the project. One thing that both emphasised was the embedding of the resource in the new Faculty structure, where there will be five semi-autonomous units that will need to engage with the resource. It would further this end to have on our "envelope team" (which I was calling the "core team" in other documents today) representatives from each Faculty - these can be gathered from (1) personal invitations onto the project, and (2) the general trawl for interested parties in advance of June 24th. It would also be good, says Louise, to talk to the Faculty PVCs this autumn, advertising the resource, saying how their Faculty would benefit, and how (hopefully) someone from their end has already been involved.

Nadine was very persuasive about the need to respect disciplinary thinking, and to design a resource that anyone can use. Her point was that people like us were lateral thinkers, happy to make connections between different academic spheres and disciplines; but users of the resource might be much more discipline-focused, and wanting the relevance to them highlighted and double-underscored. We might in time want to develop tutor-facing guides tailored to different disciplines, even if the differences between them are largely cosmetic. Along with this subtlety in emphasis, we should also offer a variety of navigational structures around the resource, providing different ways in to the same things. Finally, Nadine suggested factoring in some re-design time, or at least an extended design process from January 09 onwards. LeTS projects need to have plenty of time set aside because they're complex and professional products, and it's worth thinking that through when you talk about responding to how users are engaging with a resource, and ways in which it could be made better. All very good advice, and that, coupled with a productive writing session this morning and a helpful green light from Louise on certain key issues, has made it an extremely positive day.

What we've agreed to do next

2008-05-23T12:02:00.004+01:00

WK to continue working through the participant-facing summary and making changes. This will be completed by Thursday 29th, at which meeting we will go through it together and produce a more finalised version. He will also review the project meeting outline, to be confirmed at the same meeting.
TH will work on a rough costings outline for the DLTDs / Steve / Louise, based on the number of meetings we've arranged and the catering etc. attached to those.

After the next meeting, we need to start getting in touch with the possible third and fourth members of the core core team; this list will be transfered to Backpack in due course, and doubtless we'll stumble across some of them during Best Practice Week.

Feedback from Student Support Forum

2008-05-16T17:06:00.002+01:00

I've just come from a Student Support Forum meeting, which is essentially a talking-shop for partners in Student Services and academic departments to discuss big ideas and plans. TASH, you won't be surprised to learn, counts as one of these, so we had a very brief presentation and discussion of the project right at the end of the meeting.

Two key points - firstly, a huge amount of nodding and support from the room, especially from Andrew West and Debora Green - they both said this sort of thing is overdue. And secondly, many of the items that preoccupied the rest of the meeting were to do with student community and belonging, and in the worst instances, failures of this sense of community. I didn't realise this was such an issue for support and academic departments, and wonder whether, alongside all the inclusive curricula, transition support, etc. etc. language we're using, there's space also for helping develop a sense of belonging? Or at least that the institution values students as individuals? Anyway, just a thought, and the main message is about the support for the scheme.

Meeting with LeTS colleagues

2008-05-15T22:22:00.003+01:00

Another very helpful meeting with Steve Collier, Paul Wigfield, and Danny Monaghan from LeTS. We got the green light on organising a launch event on the 24th of June; and we got general approval for our plans for moving forwards, and for developing a more detailed bid and timeline. We also had more useful conversations about what the resource might look like, and what it would do. We're still working on this small, light centre model, but I think now structured around a single site, with an extensive "Comments" function, where users can post their reflections on sites, and any other useful links they find. This site will be a hub in the sense of the one place you go to access a series of resources, and as a front page (like iGoogle) that offers customisable dynamic and static content.

To pick up on points from the last meeting, Steve confirmed that this project would follow the outline of an LTDG, with similar forms and deadlines; however, it was suggested that we would have greater flexibility than the standard timescale for this, given that the DLTD panel are acting as our line managers and may be able to approve our Stage Two paperwork at a meeting other than the ones suggested. Paul and Danny also filled us in on other projects (including one on academic writing being discussed between Geography, English, and the ELTC) and fed back their experiences on developing Resources for Courses. Essentially, they saw this as a space that had grown so large it was difficult to manage, and that if we opened the floodgates to universal submission, we might encounter the same difficulty. Paul also talked about the MOLE tutorial store, which has been designed with a series of questions at the front, allowing the user to find out what they need, rather than pick their way through different tools and options. This relatively light signposting (our new word for diagnostic) model is helpful, especially if we can work something out along the lines of a personalisable hub, where the learner's preferences and history are recorded, and future choices influenced by these. In time, this could become a tab within MUSE, thereby giving users the one-stop-shop academic information that we initially proposed.

Our rough timeline was approved, with a lot of research and development work before the end of the year; then the Stage Two submission; then production, with alpha testing in April. Steve was keen to get students involved with the design of the resource as soon as possible, and suggested that finding second-year student testers in the first semester of 08/09 might be the way forward - we'd have something to show them, and they should be in a position to appreciate what skills they felt they'd lacked during the first year. The Student Officer from the Union, and perhaps someone from CILASS' SAN should be invited to the June meeting, and it would be worth talking to Debs Fowler and Chris Stokes about the pre- and post-entry concerns they've identified amongst students.

So, what to do next. Steve will continue talking to Louise, confirm the accessibility of funding for the June 24th meeting, and keep clarifying the approval and design process for the resource. WK, TH and (presumably) JM will organise the event on the 24th (WK has already enquired to CILASS about using one of their rooms), keep working on the timeline (especially focusing on the 2008 dates), and finish off the participant-facing survey. Easy enough, then; now, where's that time machine?

We will do...

2008-05-09T16:10:00.002+01:00

Tim (if he has time to do anything) will work on task four of the list below, namely an initial rough sort of resources that we definitely want to include in the resource. This is likely to be another google doc of some kind.

Willy will work on the next version of the participant-facing summary, including specifying aims and outcomes. If he has time on top of this, he will keep adding detail to the timeline.

These various documents will then be presented to Steve, Paul, and whichever other LeTS colleagues are in attendance on Thursday. In the light of their comments, we will work on the next iteration of these in our next meeting (Monday 19th).

The Ultraversity

2008-05-05T21:24:00.002+01:00

The project to which Phil pointed us on Friday is here. From an initial look, the programme looks just as exciting and innovative as she described it; and from more a more pragmatic point of view, I quite like the look and feel of the site. Oh, and they do exhibition preparation and reflection as part of their assessment; at level three. There are only a few ideas ever in circulation...

Meeting with Steve Collier

2008-04-30T13:46:00.002+01:00

A thought-provoking meeting with Steve, which not only prompted me to reflect on what we wanted to do with this project and how we might achieve it, but also opened up a set of new resources in terms of LeTS staff and contacts who might be able to help. Steve began the meeting by saying he knew of other colleagues and LeTS projects and contacts who might want to be involved - for example, Paul Wigfield has a good oversight of the different learner-support mechanisms currently within the university, and has been contacted by other members of staff (e.g. Rachel Falconer) who are interested in developing study skills resources. So there's a lot going on already, and LeTS are well-positioned to put us to it. At the same time, Steve cautioned us against assuming that all academics would be immediately happy to share the resources they've developed, and suggested that we might need to be prepared for some initial rejections; I would hope that the manner in which we ask, and the emphasis we place on pedagogical reasoning and philosophy, would make contacts more likely to respond, but that might be my optimism.

Steve raised the significant question about how deep we would want to go into other resources; e.g. do we point someone to a front page of a resource, a particular section, a particular sub-section? This is important not least because it will determine much of the structure of the self-analysis and referring mechanism, and the level of detail that has to offer. The immediate response will always be "it depends on the resource", but it will be worth bearing this in mind as our set of resources grows. Clearly the main principle has to be that of the student's needs and interests, and it would be disappointing if (1) we pointed them to a resource at so general a level that they ignored it; and/or (2) if the specificity of the reference prevented them from looking around and finding other useful things. Perhaps one obvious solution is to adopt the quite blog-like tactic of identifying the general resource, before pointing them to something more particularly useful.

The discussion moved on to cover timelines and expectations. Steve suggested Louise might be aiming for the mid-June meeting of the LTDG panel, where she could present a detailed costing of the project. In his opinion, given the scale of the work, this was unrealistic, and he would prefer a deadline of September for a fully-costed bid. He also emphasised, and I am mindful of his experience with LTDG projects, that we need to narrow our ideas a little before opening them up to a wider group. It might be that the specific things we suggest are changed entirely by the group, but to go in with something is always helpful, and establishing the aims of the project will help keep it on-task. As a small technical point, Steve noted that if we find MOLE resources developed by academics and housed within their particular modules, we would need to migrate these to a common space before pointing all students to them.

One model for the resource that Willy suggested was of a multi-faceted structure - there could be a "control" version, which represents what the development group put in place, and which is not open for alteration; and a "wiki" version, which would continue to grow and develop as time went on. Users with different learning preferences (?) and backgrounds would choose which they wanted to follow, and we would have a compromise between flexibility and direction in the resource's structure. The question which this partly resolves is that of student engagement - how do we get them using the resource? A useful analogy was drawn with the student handbook, where it was simply expected that all students would be aware of it, and it was made central to their time at university. Other parts of the answer include the design of the resource, which I feel I still need to emphasise, and the language we use, avoiding a deficiency model, and perhaps even the notion of diagnostic testing. This last needs to be particularly recognised when it comes to considering depths of links, and where students are being pointed to; it will be an important part of the hub resource to prepare students for where they're going, and to clarify that the information might be labeled "for dyslexic students", but it will still benefit them.

At the end of the meeting we agreed that Steve would:

Contact Louise to clarify the funding for the project, especially in terms of (a) the possible involvement of a member of the Careers Service, and (b) the timeline that this will enforce;
Identify other projects and resources LeTS are currently engaged with that might synergise with this one.

The things that Willy and I agreed to do were:

Draft a more detailed project plan including timelines, and where possible approximate costings; for instance, greater clarity around the day events was suggested as sending the right message;
Establish the aims of the resource, concentrating in particular on what it would achieve, and how student and staff engagement can be assured;
Develop a participant-facing summary of the project, picking up on the need to share resources, integrate this within departmental practices, structure it in a non-deficit way, etc.; and
List existing resources that we will take as a starting-point for developing diagnostic guides.

From this list, it seems that (1) and (2) might be best done together, at our next meeting on the 9th of May. I would be happy to work on a first draft of (3), with the obvious proviso that this might change in the light of our work together. If you could prepare something relating to (4) for our next meeting, that might be helpful, otherwise we'll just pull it together on the day. How does that sound?

So, a productive and informative meeting, with plenty of stuff to do as a consequence. We're in the fortunate position of being funded to do it; and I'm becoming increasingly eager to find some short-term responsibilities that can be out-sourced in the very near future...

Getting the ball rolling...

2008-04-28T20:23:00.002+01:00

...to see what it looks like, as much as anything else. Thanks again for an extremely useful meeting today, and I hope we continue to be equally productive and on-task in future.

One of the many aspects of the project that we didn't explore today, and which we might benefit from working through in the near future, is the possibility of different pitches to different interest groups. For example, what do we want to emphasise when we're talking to:

academics?
central services?
students?
colleagues in the department and school?

Clearly, all of these can be sub-divided, and the list isn't exhaustive. I just wanted to flag up one of my main lessons from the first generic skills meeting, that in order to get the big-boat, broad-church appeal we're hoping for, we might need to discuss what is likely to be most attractive for the various participants.