Few! The Forum is over.
We started the day with discovering that the projector in the main hall had gone and had to be replaced, then we got word that there was a major accident on the M5, suggesting that some of the participants may be delayed.
However, most of the participants registered turned up and a few extras for the University of Gloucestershire were able to get away from their commitments for part of the day.
Prof Patricia Broadfoot, Gloucestershire VC, opened the conference commending the Forum participants for our commitment to the research of teaching and learning because she described this as providing the evidence base for addressing a major challenge of 21st universities.
‘Learning is not … Listening’
… it is so many other things which she went on to discuss.
We were very pleased with the interest in the active approaches we designed into the days events.
In the morning presentations the presenters and chairs did remarkably well in keeping to our almost impossible restrictions of 5 minutes and three slides per presentation in the morning sessions. We hope to post some resources from these presentations in the form of audio or video or Powerpoint presentations shortly. If you took part in these discussions, please post a comment if you didn’t get the chance to be heard on the day – or even if you did. I was only able to attend the Diversity session, but would really have liked to attend the others, so would be interested to hear what people said.
The ’speed dating’ session went extremely well. Some people clearly met their ideal research partner because they seemed reluctant to move on to another date!!
The lunch was enjoyed by everyone. This was done by outside caterers to the university (see previous post). We would welcome any feedback if you were there.
The Learning Cafe created quite a buzz in the afternoon. We have collected in the table cloths and post-it notes and intend to collate this information and make this available online shortly. Please watch out for this and comment if you feel the urge. In the meantime, I typed up the main bullet points from each chair as a separate post. Please have a look at these posts that I typed up as the Table Hosts were feeding back to the Plenary and post a comment:
- 21st century universities
- Academic Leadership in HE
- Technology Enhanced Learning
- Engaging Diverse Communities
- Internationalising the curriculum
- Linking Research Teaching and Practice
- Education for Sustainable Development
We would really like this Forum to result in a number of collaborations – otherwise it was just a nice day and a ‘talking shop’. So please keep us in touch with anything that results and let us know if we can assist. Lindsey suggested in the summing up at the end of the Plenary that PRSI has some activities, such as seminars, writing initiatives and so on that we would be keen to share with other institutions. Please get in touch and let’s see if we can achieve something from this.
During the course of the day I spoke to a number of people who had met other participants with common interests or in some cases were working on projects that were remarkably similar. We hope that these meetings and sharings will result in networks for some, collaborations for others.
So is this the end or is it the beginning? Can we continue the forum discussions in some way that will result in tangible outputs? How will this work?
Kenny
The image is ‘Finish Line‘ by ptufts made available under a Creative Commons license, found using the image search on Creative Commons
Posted by Kenneth Lynch 