First Year Experience and Quality Processes Brief available from SPARQS-QAA Event

Yesterday's SPARQS-QAA Briefing Event (24th november 2005) included a presentation by by James Alexander and Tim Cobbett, student members of the Scottish Higher Education Enhancement Committee, on Quality Processes in Higher Education. Also of interest is a briefing on QAA Scotland's Enhancement Theme for the 'First Year Experience.' Both documents are now available on the SPARQS website. Direct links for the briefings are found below:

Quality Processes In Higher Education
QAA Scotland: Enhancement Themes Briefing Note

Information literacy dissemination workshop set for December

Dorothy Williams and Caroline Wavell at Aberdeen Business School have been working on a project "looking at secondary teachers' conceptions of information literacy in relation to their classroom practice". They have kindly alerted me to a dissemination workshop planned for the 7th December, 2005, from 10:00 to 16:00 at the Garthdee Campus. They are keen to attract teachers and pre-service, CPD academics to the event so as to "give them a chance to explore the issues and learn a little more about it."

The project web page, with details of the study and workshop, is http://www.rgu.ac.uk/abs/research/page.cfm?pge=13088.

Planning & Evaluating Effective Practice with e-Learning workshop

A Planning & Evaluating Effective Practice with e-Learning workshop will be held at Edinburgh University on the 18th of January 2006.

This joint JISC/HEA workshop is aimed at advanced practitioners, e-learning champions, staff developers and other people supporting effective practice with e-learning. The workshop will be highly interactive and participants will use tools, test models, and provide feedback to help further develop and adapt the materials. Consultation with participants will be used to inform the JISC e-learning programme and the Higher Education Academy, about effective practice in different communities, and about practitioners needs. The workshop is not an introduction to e-learning for general academic staff, and will not involve any skills training.

The event is free and more details including booking information can be found on the JISC website.

David Boud talks Assessment at Strathclyde

Professor David Boud from the Faculty of Education in Sydney's University of Technology was the guest speaker at the recent Re-Engineering Assessment Practices Workshop in Strathclyde's Centre for Academic Practice and Learning Enhancement on November 15th .

Boud made a presentation on 'Thinking about assessment in Higher Education' and had us all doing just that. His talk covered the purposes of assessment, development of assessment thinking, thinking about developing judgement and choosing appropriate tasks and processes. Of particular interest was the idea that traditional forms of assessment can, in instances, be more harmful than helpful and his discussion of 'sustainable assessment.' His presentation will be hosted by the REAP website.

The Re-Engineering Assessment Practices in Scottish Higher Education (REAP) project is an e-learning transformation project led by the University of Strathclyde. The director of REAP is Dr David Nicol with Catherine Owen as project manager. For more information, we encourage you to visit REAP.

International Consortium for Educational Development

The 2006 International Consortium for Educational Development 6th International Conference from the 11th to the 14th of June 2006 at Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK. The International Consortium for Educational Development (ICED) is committed to promoting educational/academic/faculty development across its member networks and supporting the establishment of new networks with the aim of improving the experience of learning and teaching in higher and tertiary education throughout the world.

SECOND CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

The conference theme is Enhancing Academic Development - International Perspectives. You are invited to submit proposals for the ICED 2006 conference (see http://iced2006.shu.ac.uk ).

Conference Themes

The ICED 2006 conference provides an opportunity to explore a diverse range of approaches and contexts for academic development around the world. The emphasis is on evaluation, reflection and learning from these varied experiences in order to enhance our understanding and practice of academic development.

For more information, visit http://iced2006.shu.ac.uk.

Information Literacy petition to the Scottish Parliament

John Crawford (Glasgow Caledonian) and Chris Milne (Abertay) have presented a petition to the Scottish Parliament on the subject of information literacy.

It calls upon the Scottish Parliament 'to urge the Scottish Executive to ensure that that national school curriculum recognises the importance of information literacy as a key lifelong learning skill.' The supporting document explains this and suggests ways forward. There are two stages in petitioning the Scottish parliament.

1. An electronic petition which aims to collect signatures in support of the petition
2. A petition to the Public Petitions Committee of the Scottish Parliament

Obviously the second stage will carry much more weight if the e-petition attracts a lot of signatures and I would urge people to add their names which they can do by going to the under noted URL. My MSP (Member of the Scottish Parliament) Ken Mackintosh has been very supportive in preparing the petition and is going to ask a question in the Scottish Parliament in support of the petition so we should be able to generate quite a lot of interest. The petition will be up on the web until Friday 16th December. The Petitions Committee meets on 21st December and will consider the petition then. Although the Public Petitions Committee is a Scottish institution it very much welcomes support from all over the world so contributions are welcome from south of the Tweed/ Solway and beyond.

For more information, see http://epetitions.scottish.parliament.uk/view_petition.asp?PetitionID=76