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https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2017/09/20/the-state-of-being-stuck/#more-7860

Interesting article about learning mathematics. I suspect that it is relevant to the hard sciences, but raises the interesting question about the hunanities, what if anything is the equivalent?

davidandrew52

https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2017/may/10/university-staff-unhappy-with-institutional-leadership?CMP=share_btn_fb

After a much shorter debate due to the General Election the HE Bill is now an act, leaving us all to wonder if a better outcome would have been possible with fuller discussion.

As ever WonkHE has a good guide and lots of background information.

It probably doesn't mean anything to those who didn't live through it, but WonkHE reminds us that's it is 25 years since the end to the university/polytechnic divide in the UK

I started my career in a polytechnic and have mixed feelings.  I think there were positive aspects to polytechnic education when it worked well.  It could have a positive focus on the vocational, which was popular with students but often misunderstood by the institution.  I was the programme director for the BTEC programmes in Business.  There was a tendency for everyone to assume that students did HND's because they couldn't get into a degree course, but in a couple of years when managers noticed that in clearing the entry requirements for the degree had fallen below that of the HND and wrote to students offering a switch they were surprised when the majority said no - but they never learnt.  The students had a more positive view of the courses, fortunately shared by the majority of the staff who taught on them.  But it was an interesting microcosm of the fundamental problem of parity of esteem of vocational education. While you can argue the existence of the divide continued that problem, I think the end of the divide did nothing to move us forward.

There was a specific form of teaching which we did well - related to Boyer's Scholarship of Application, although again the institution (or at least managers) didn't recognise it.  We taught student's how to apply academic knowledge.  As I say it wasn't recognised enough.  I inherited a couple of courses on Work Psychology and an introduction to psychology for accountancy, both were unexciting and irrelevant.  I managed to give them a focus on how to apply psychology in business/accountancy and the students got engaged.  It also gave me a different perspective on the academic subject.

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For some time I have been looking for an on-line tool to create diagrams for a variety of tasks, and I have recently rediscovered draw.io which I am finding very useful for doing simple mindmaps  and venn diagrams (which I use in teaching as a basic logic tool).  For both of these functions there are specialist tools, but I am finding draw.io easier to use than most - and sufficient for what I want to do.

The programme will connect to a  range of cloud storage facilities so you can save to Google Drive, Idrive etc, and it automatically saves changes there.  You can then either publish links to your diagrams or embed them in web pages.  The embedded files do take a little while to load so my plan is to embed them while I am still developing them (they, then get automatically updated) but will replace them with static versions when I am finished.  There are a couple of examples on my website in the approaches section where I wanted to start with a mindmap rather than text.

An article in the Wonkhe news email this morning reminded me of a sign I saw yesterday outside of a school in South West London - Headline 'Top of the Class', with the strapline - 'Every child is important' - which highlights for me the ambiguity in education about fairness etc.

I have just published an old working paper on Researchgate (DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.15599.43686).

This paper describes part of a series of reflective research on the teaching of a Business School module 'Organisational Analysis and Design* (OAD). This element of the research looked at the experiences and difficulties faced by a group of students who take the module as a compulsory module in a science faculty degree. The study uses David Kolb's model of the experiential learning cycle to understand differences in teaching strategy and learning processes. In the context of modular degrees, it raises issues about the difficulties of moving from one academic discipline to another, and questions what information we should be providing to students about the teaching strategy of modules.

I would be interested in any comments.

Paper also available here.