This year I'm hearing a lot about 'the crit' from participants enrolled on the Assessment and Feedback module I teach as part of the PGCert course. 'Crit' is associated with stress, fear and anxiety, yet is evidently part of the culture of Art and Design subjects.
I found this video online. I do feel very sorry for the student.
I've put together a mash-up of a literature and some videos I created as part of the Getting the Most out of Feedback project. This page will be moved to the Brighton CLT in due course. Comments welcome.
I attended an interesting discussion about open learning led by Jon Dron from Athabasca University in Canada. We discussed open access, open learning in various forms, open educational resources and open source software. We also discussed why we do, or do not give away our knowledge, time and resources for free. (I’ll leave the ‘why’ for another post).
I am a big user of free software and, of the most part, a recipient of rather than a contributor to the various websites, blogs and forums providing knowledge about its use. However I provide a lot of my stuff for free. This is not to make any comments about its quality.
Video recordings of my interviews with Simon Kemp and Bella Millet are now on youtube.
The last volume of Début: the undergraduate journal of languages, linguistics and area studies I will edit is going online in the next week or so. I thought I'd share a bit of my editorial.
Editorial: All change at Début
John Canning
Final-year projects and dissertations (FYPD) undertaken by students at the end of their Bachelor degree courses are a topic of current interest in many countries. It is timely to reassert the importance of FYPD and to rethink their role in the curriculum as the context of higher education changes. (Healy et al 2013).
Every year thousands of undergraduates undertake a final year project, an independent study or some other form of original research. Most of this research is never seen by anyone outside the student's own department. I don't know if a copy of my own undergraduate dissertation still exists somewhere in depths of Aberystwyth University. I think I had my own copy, if it survives it is probably in my parents' attic. As far as I know it was not read by anyone other than those who marked it. I can't recall receiving any feedback on it, except the mark which was printed alongside the results of my other modules.
I don't regard the non-publication of my own undergraduate work as a great loss to the world. In contrast I regard setting up Début : the undergraduate journal of languages, linguistics and area studies which enables others to publish their undergraduate work as one of my major achievements. Undergraduate (and recently graduated) authors have received feedback on their work from academics outside their own institutions. They have revised their work and made great work even better.
This is my final edition as Debut Editor. I would like to thank all the authors, reviewers, colleagues at LLAS in Southampton, and colleagues all over the world who have urged their students to submit their work to Début : the undergraduate journal of languages, linguistics and area studies 4 (2013)
Without all these people Début would not be possible.
From September 2013 Billy Clark, Senior Lecturer in English Language at Middlesex University will be taking over as editor.
I look forward to seeing Début prosper under Billy's leadership and wish him all the best.
Reference
Healey M., L.Lannin, A, Stibbe and J. Derounian (2013) Developing and enhancing undergraduate final year projects and dissertations. York: Higher Education Academy. Available from: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/projects/detail/ntfs/ntfsproject_Gloucestershire10
The website for our Getting More Out of Feedback is coming along nicely. As part of the Sharing Practice in Assurance and Enhancing Quality (SPEAQ) project, this GMOOF project aims to join up the quality circles of the student, the teacher, and the quality manager. Rather than having separate websites for students, teachers and quality managers on giving and receiving feedback, we recognise that good feedback from teacher to students, students to teachers, teachers to teachers, students to students, teacher to professional body etc. etc. has the same characteristics.
Phil Race characterises good feedback as:
Good feedback has these characteristics, irrespective of who is the provider of feedback and who is the recipient.
The website also contains a brief review of the literature on feedback in higher education.
As well as the xtranormal videos I mentioned in a previous post we have interviews with various members of staff, in preparation. My interview with my LLAS colleague Laurence Georgin is available on youtube and through the site.
Team effort on this one. We made the video for our Getting More out of Feedback Project. The script was adapted from my literature review by Laurence Georgin and Fiona Harvey. Fiona Harvey who works at the Centre for Innovation and Technologies, University of Southampton, produced the drawings. One of our University Digital champions edited the video and did the commentary.