Nothing particularly interesting

I work in a College which is primarily dedicated to Further Education, but which in the last few years has begun to offer Higher Education degree courses to students, which we develop ourselves and are 'validated' by a University. One of my jobs here (besides teaching literature and language) is to draft policies and regulations for the management of Higher Education within the Further Education College. This is a rather challenging role, partly because the whole issue of regulating HE is inherently complex and partly because it means a series of negotiations and compromises with a College regulatory infrastructure more dedicated to meeting the requirements of Ofsted than the QAA.

So here's the reason why you will never catch me dead in the Business reading rooms at the British Library.  I know nobody is asking, and nobody cares, but I am on a tea break and need some way chill. Last week I sat in the coffee shop opposite the library waiting for the magical moment when the doors open and you enter the pristine stillness of that glorious building, filled only with the keenest and most determined of researchers.  Next to me in the coffee shop there was a couple of fellow 'British Libriers' discussing a new invention which they were planning to patent, and which they were working on marketing.  Their conversation was littered with jargon about cost margins and maximization and goodness knows what other horrors.

Up to now I have done relatively well with my New Year resolutions .  I have been swearing less (although must still admit to resorting to to occasional 'damn', albeit mainly because it is 'jollyphonic', or ' fun to say' ).  My feelings towards Mr. Gove (notice that? I called him 'Mr.') have been reigned in to be manifested only in the occasional classroom analogy and occasionally re-tweeting the ever-increasing evidence of his narcissistic and unilaterally retrograde approach to educational policy. And as for getting angry about politics? Well, UKIP have just won some local elections in my area.  By a considerable margin .  In one sense this is no real surprise, given that the area I live in dances predominantly on the right wing of most elections - but it is a blow nonetheless.  What makes me particularly irate about this is that the UKIP campaign did not even try to work strategically on tapping into the sentiments of disaffected Conservative or L...

Since I had a very good response to my previous post about creating dynamic reading lists in a VLE course page, I thought it might be worth following up with another little thing which I have just been working on: Image-mapped menus.  An image map, in case you don't know, is a picture in which there are certain areas which act as 'hotspots', and can take you to different links.  It can be a rather neat way of just making your own course stand out a little, and of making it perhaps even a little more fun to use for students who may well be getting bored of standardised and often rather dull templates. There are some specialist tools, which do this job very well - but they are not always the easiest to work out.  More recently, I have starting using a free online resource called image-maps.com - which frankly makes the whole thing as simple as it can get.

This, then is my experiment with reading lists this semester.  It has been driven in part by the extent to which referencing management tool Zotero has become so deeply embedded in my own way of working, and in part by the tentative initial evidence which suggests that the quality of referencing and consistency of criticality in students work can tangibly benefit by using it. To begin with, I have created a group in Zotero called Newham University Centre.  I could, of course, create a separate group for each module I am teaching, but since this is a first-time experiment it seemed simpler to try a generic approach to begin with: This group will now appear in my folder structure online, in my standalone version, or in my browser extension.  From here, I can now drag accross my folders with reading lists - or create my reading lists directly into the group library folders: To manage the group members, I need to go to the Zotero website.  Clicking on the 'G...

Today was my first day back in the classroom (hooray!), and despite feeling about as unprepared and disorganised as I ever have on a first week, it is certainly good to be doing 'real work' again.  Today, I was introducing a module on the philosphy of language.  This tends to be rather a fun module, because it focuses more on the ideas of a few key philosophers (Socrates, Locke, Humboldt, Russell, Davidson, Austin), and the classroom experience of thrashing ideas about is much more at the heart of both the learning and assessment process. The assessment itself for this module takes the form of a learning journal, in which students are required to effectively 'blog' each week about what they have learned.  This will hopefully mean that their work will demonstrate on-going reading, thinking and (perhaps more importantly than all) observing language at work. Since I am demanding that my students write each week about the experience, I would feel a little guilty if I di...

Loading... Language is frequently defined as being simply a form of communication – and this is true to an extent, because language is certainly a means of communication. But then there are many ways in which both humans and animals communicate. A Chimpanzee might wave its hand in such a way as to communicate irritation, or anger. A husband might leave a rose with his wife’s breakfast in order to communicate love. There are even forms of communication which humans and animals make without any conscious effort at all. As two cats approach each other, they pick up from scents, sounds and body posture whether the other cat is friendly or unfriendly. A women meeting a man for the first time might unconsciously flutter their eyelids, part her lips and fidget with her hair in a way which indicates attraction. Or a man being questioned by the police might blink rapidly and look up towards the right in a way which might suggest they are lying. In both these examples, we can see a mean...