Stephen Powell, thoughts mostly about learning

Reflecting on the Jisc Cetis conference and trying to distill my key learning I remembered the Gordon Brown Arctic Monkeys gaff.
When in response to a question from a journalist from New Woman magazine, he said of the Arctic Monkeys on his iPod it “really wakes you up in the morning”. Subsequently [...]

PLEs and the institution: “Given a lot of recent comments we really have to elaborate the set of connections between what an institution offers and what individuals manage. I’ve tried to put some of how I think this should work in a diagram (as usual).” (Via Scott Wilson’s Workblog).
What I like about the model provided [...]

David Eastwood on widening university access: If the students will not come to us, we must find ways of going to them, says David Eastwood. (Via Education Guardian, Tuesday October 23, 2007).
The Four Cities report provides useful background to my work on the idibl project at the University of Bolton.
The research aimed [...]

‘Inherently frail’ – the verdict on marking:
“Call for debate as lack of consistency in assessment attracts warning of student litigation. Rebecca Attwood reports. Lecturers’ marking of student work is “inherently frail” and assessment procedures would struggle to stand up to legal challenge, academics warned this week.” (Via The THES news).

The interesting [...]

A Times Higher article about developments Gloucestershire University, 19 October 2007.
I have posted the encouraging news from Gloucester further down this post, but I wanted to challenge the reported position taken by Adrian Furnham, a professor of psychology at University College London who found:
“that the least intelligent students favour coursework because it allows them to [...]

From the BBC “Degrees ’should give more detail Tuesday, 16 October 2007, 12:13 GMT 13:13 UK
“…an inquiry conducted by university leaders says it has not found any better degree classification system.
So grades such as first class, 2:1 and 2:2 will continue alongside a pilot scheme giving more detailed exam marks.
This will give employers more [...]

Unless we can imagine a better name soon, the work that Richard Millwood, Mark Johnson and I are undertaking for the Institute for Educational Cybernetics (IEC) at the University of Bolton will be branded as the IDIBL project. The website we are building is using the much loved Plone (version 3.0) which has come [...]

The BBC reports: Derive for more mature students
The rhetoric reported below fits squarely with our work at the Institute for Educational Cybernetics at Bolton University, as we work towards developing a range of new offering for workplace-based learning using inquiry methodology. It will be interesting to see if the governments words translate into any [...]