I’m going to say it: I hate maths. Well, not the sexy stuff that’s super interesting like zero, infinity, chaos, or probability but the easy stuff that ties your brain in knots when working in a shop - long division! (Still can’t do it…) Why do I hate maths? Many fears and dislikes are rooted in bad childhood experiences. My fear of maths is down to Mrs Nameless, who physically dragged me out of class on more than one occasion, calling me out in front of all my classmates and using my full name to boot - the horror!

In July’s SALT Conference, I presented a demonstration of OneNote Class Notebook to my colleagues. As it was a bit chaotic and unstructured, I prepared presentation in Sway that I made available after the session. (I also promised a video which is still on my to-do-list.) Interestingly, our own Paul Manning (@PaulCManning) and OneNote Central (@OneNoteC) spotted my Sway and after a short twitter conversation that turned to Microsoft Teams, @OneNoteC tweeted a useful collection of resources on Teams for Education:

I’ve decided to return to social media a bit earlier than planned. Here are two things that I thought I needed to share and brought me out if hibernation. For the first, I’ve been catching up on Bryan Alexander’s discussions in his Future Trends Forum which can be viewed on this YouTube channel. I’ve been particularly interested in the discussion with Phil Hill on ‘Towards the future Learning Msnsgement System’ and ‘The Future of Moodle’ with Martin Dougiamas.

Over the last week or so, I have found myself getting more and more depressed about the state of the world and my place in it. The constant bad news about the UK election, Brexit, Trump, and the vile responses you read when you follow a Tweet stream on any of these topics. The crisis in Higher Education, too many students, falling student satisfaction, TEF, the stress of teaching and managing teaching, the false dawn of e-learning, analytics, AI; dire warnings about so-called “Generation-Z” students and their likely impact; and the devaluation of human relationships between teachers and their students.

On Wednesday, I chaired a presentation session at Swansea University’s annual SALT conference “Reaching for Teaching Excellence” (#susalt17). In the session the three speakers all presented examples of what might be summarized as authentic assessment of students engaged in content co-creation through problem based learning. First up we had Tanya May from Modern Languages who presented “Start where you are, use what you can: an online professional portfolio in the Spanish Class.

At Wednesday’s SALT Conference, I presented a demonstration of OneNote Class Notebook to my colleagues. As it was a bit chaotic and unstructured, I prepared presentation in Sway that I made available after the session. (I also promised a video which is still on my to-do-list.) Interestingly, our own Paul Manning (@PaulCManning) and OneNote Central (@OneNoteC) spotted my Sway and after a short twitter conversation that turned to Microsoft Teams, @OneNoteC tweeted a useful collection of resources on Teams for Education:

#LTHEchat is another ongoing twitter chat that takes place one hour every week during University term time (on Wednesdays at 8:00 UK time). The purpose is to discuss various issues around Higher Education. The event was launched by Sue Beckingham (@suebecks) of Sheffield Hallam University and Chrissi Nerantzi (@chrissinerantzi) of Manchester Metropolitan University in October 2014. Since 2015/2016 the event has been organised by a rotating team of volunteers who run it for a semester.

As part of my maintaining my professional registration as a Chartered Engineer (C.Eng.), I am now required to record and reflect on my CPD and have my training records for 2016 audited by the IET. This has meant going back through my calendar and trying to recall all the CPD events and activities that I was involved with for the last 18 months so that I can populate my historic data and then hopefully continue to record events in more real time thereafter.

In this article published by Turning Technologies - makers of audience response system TurningPoint, clickers and ResponseWare - Professor of Chemistry Education at the University of East Anglia and National Teaching Fellow Simon Lancaster (@S_J_lancaster) discusses how he is encouraging his colleagues to use Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) to engage students in lecture theatres. Here is a video of Simon’s keynote from the 2015 Sheffield Hallam University Learning and Teaching Conference in which he expands on and demonstrates these ideas.

https://flic.kr/p/8CBBk5 As an engineer with a keen interest in software development and the web I suppose I come to “Open” with a philosophy formed from my exposure to the Open Source Software movement. I remember reading Raymond’s The Cathedral to the Bazaar, and being fascinated by Richard Stallman, the Gnu Project, and his idea of Copyleft introduced by the Gnu General Public Licence (GPL). When it came to YouTube and Flickr, making my works available via a CC-BY licence seemed the right thing to do.

Inspired by friend and colleague Debbie Baff’s “Homeless blog posts”, I’ve just had a look at my own Wordpress draft posts folder. I clearly had things that I wanted to say 3 months ago and I had a critique of HEA fellowship (still not resolved) a month ago. I also haven’t posted anything that wasn’t a tweet since March 2. Perhaps we should all share our drafts (suitably redacted) from time to time, if only to spark us to get back on the blogging-bike.

On March first, Prof Sally Brown, recognised expert in Assessment and Feedback for HE, delivered a Webinar on Getting Started with Assessment and Feedback as part of the Transforming Assessment series. The recording of the seminar, both as a Blackboard Collaborate session and on YouTube is now available and well worth watching as part of your CPD. The link to the seminar page provides access to the many resources for beginners in HE assessment mentioned in the Webinar.