Reading

I am fortunate to have been excused a lot of the conference preparation that is going on apace at Windsor, so have been able to read widely around the broad topic of educational development. I am constantly amazed (or is it reassuring and to be anticipated) that articles that are ostensibly about one topic contain ideas, references or methods which are or could be relevant in other places. To give you an example, I have three workshops in preparation at the moment - one on the institutional helps and hindrances to Inquiry based learning, another on evaluation, scholarship and research in the contest of educational development and a third on the changing roles and rewards for faculty (in the North American sense). As I browse the journals I find articles by Angela Brew that give me definitions or descriptions of IBL at the same time as giving me ideas about the scholarship of teaching and learning. An article entitled "Changes in Higher Education and valuing the job:the views of accounting academics in Australia" gives me ideas for why IBL might be hard to implement across a discipline, let alone a University. I think the concept of transferability must come in here somewhere.

The greatest pleasure I get from this observation for myself, is that the benefits of this sabbatical are likely to pop up in different ways once I am back at Canterbury because the reading I have done has covered such a diverse range of topics, and the biggest headache it is creating is how to file all these references. Endnote is not available at Windsor and I haven't done the training at Canterbury, so feel a bit overwhelmed by that software, and Refworks does not seem to provide sufficient detail for what I want, so I have an spidery systems of folders and sub-folders on the hard drive and hope that the contents will be able to be easily downloaded to a new USB stick! So some technology gains, but not yet enough.

Photo today takes us to yet another country - County Down in Northern Ireland. I just love the lighting in this picture (and the memories of my youth that it conjures up!).