The long weekend

Monday 19 May is Victoria Day in Canada - isn't it strange how the outposts of the Empire continue to celebrate regal days when such celebrations no longer happen in the UK!

Well I got to the University of Waterloo and had some really interesting conversations with the director of the Centre for Teaching Excellence (yet another title) and her colleagues Trevor and Mark. It seems that there are plenty of places reviewing their Learning Management Systems so good ideas to be shared across the globe. Mark, with help from some colleagues, has just started a wiki to be found here http://netsavvy.uwaterloo.ca/. He has set it up not just for his colleagues at Waterloo but for others anywhere who are interested in New Educational Technologies. Not to be outdone,UCTL, and in particular Mike, posts podcasts regularly on issues of interest in the world of teaching and learning http://uctv.canterbury.ac.nz/1/139/ . I have been interviewed today by my host Alan, and no doubt some of that conversation will find its way onto the CTL website in due course. UW has an interesting summer academy for selected staff who spend four days reviewing and replanning a course. The content of this programme is challenging and stimulating for staff and participants alike, but the particular idea that appealed to me was the duration of the programme - a four day period spread over (but not formally including) a weekend. As Trevor says "there is an amazing amount of thinking and processing goes on over the break. It is perhaps also easier to get three days from one week and one from the next, rather than being away for 4 days all in the same week. It also does give that bonus time for those who are willing to take it.

from I spent the later part of Thursday evening with Nicola from UW at her home on the shores of Lake Ontario (I think)- when I found it. I wondered how she managed to do a two hour trip each way to work four times a week - lots of thinking time! But I discovered that if you follow the right signposts it can be done in 55 minutes. So unfortunately I lost all that conversation time with a like minded soul. Our conversations ranged over a wide variety of topics, not least of which was the nature of employment of staff in Centres for Teaching and Learning. I know this is a topic that has been aired on a list serve recently and one that I discussed in my interview this afternoon (see later). Perhaps it is a function of the leader of the unit and their personal bias that influences the nature of the work done by a unit and the extent to which it is or is not an academic department. Then on Friday I had a very stimulating time with Erika, Paola and LailaMcMaster University. Needless to say, inquiry based learning was high on the agenda, but also the implementation of a change in Learning Management System with attendant issues of timing and preparedness. Our experiences at migrating from WebCT4.1 to 6 last year were helpful for Laila, in giving her some ideas about how to get the appropriate training in place and to encourage faculty to take it up. The research that has been done at McMaster indicates, that even if a student only takes one inquiry course, it has a positive impact throughout their entire programme.

On a completely unrelated theme (or maybe not so disconnected) as I write this blog I am listening to BBC Radio 3's Composer of the Week programme - this week's subject is Franz Waxman . This is not my usual listening but I have been prompted to listen to this programme by my friend Rachel who is valiantly working at a PhD on the subject of this composer as well as having a full time job. This programme has been put together at Rachel's suggestion. How does that count as a "publication" for the British Research Assessment Exercise or the Performance Based Research Fund in New Zealand and how is it compared to other more traditional publications? The connection is with PhD supervision - Michael and I are planning our workshop for next week to try to get together some guidelines for the University of Windsor, based on the experience of their own faculty. This reflects work done at Canterbury, using student focus groups to gather data about courses so that the faculty cannot claim that it is only research and their department is different. This is their own data and it cannot be denied. So different contexts and concepts, but the methodology is similar.

Over the weekend I spent many hours at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Hamilton and so leave you with a photo of the wonderful tulips.