Time to start making...

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

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

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 ...

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

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

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

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.