learning, teaching and research (archive)

I am sitting in my room totally knackered and badly in need of stimulants and a shower. Got to get up for the big dinner tonight and not fall to sleep in the consome.

Another great keynote today – all teachers are rubbish when they start and get to be moderately good after about 20 years; marginal improvements in learning outcomes with smaller class sizes and increased teacher subject knowledge but by far the biggest impact is produced by expert teachers employing formative assessment, aggregating the information/evidence from students and designing linked activities based on the assessement. Assessment for learning rather than ‘of’ learning outcomes. Focus on measuring outcomes a disaster in terms of ecouraging learning, etc. etc. More, much more. And I am supposed to be blogging!! Trying to isolate different learning styles and individualising teaching is all rubbish. Wrong in principle, unachievable and simply not necessary. Here is a man that knows his mind – Prof Dylan Wilian.

Some great stuff at other sessions today on social networking and use of wikis. Must get it down here soon. Also a very useful and entertaining workshop on implementing web 2.0 for e-portfolios. This used role play. My heart sunk, as usual, but it worked really well, thanks to Susannah Diamond and Andrew Middleton – a class act. All these worth several sides of A4 each.

I am hoping to be able to re-view the keynotes and the presentations and papers I went to via research extracts and slides to benefit from them and report in more detail.

Noticed someone using twitter in Facebook during keynote presentation. Short 1 or 2 sentence notes, each a separate post. I think this, or something like it, is the way to go for immediacy and to get close to real-time posting. Is this what they mean by microblogging? Then the consolidated reflective posts later. Or perhaps that is how I should have been using this blog? I’ve still got lots to learn.