One of my rules is never to do any work after I get home on a Friday evening.  However, as this is my self-designated 'blogging week' for January I am breaking that and have come back to the computer to complete my task for this month.

A good part of this morning was taken up with a Steering Group meeting relating to CILASS - the Centre for Inquiry-Based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences.  This has been a project funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and the Higher Education Academy (HEA) over the last five years and it is now coming to an end.  It has been hugely successful, not just in encouraging more activity to link research and teaching but also in the way it has explored ideas for the improvement of student experiences.  Something I learned about this morning and want to hear more on is the way in which the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health has set up schemes for undergraduates to undertake research projects on themes related to their curricula but which are not actually part of the assessed requirements - and (here's the best bit) be supervised by research students and postdocs in doing so, thus giving other more 'senior' students their first experience of supervision.  One of the great innovations across the university in the last 5 years has been the development of  a variety of student ambassador networks (sometimes known by other names) which now exist at Faculty level (in MDH and in Science, for example), within our outreach activities, within the Enterprise Zone, and not least within CILASS itself where the most fully developed model has been worked out.  In my opinion it is essential that we seek to maintain such networks and resource the support for them even in the current difficult financial climate.

Coming to the end of my first week's blogging leads me to reflect on the process of sitting down every evening and trying to interest others in what I've been doing.  Part of my motivation to do so has been the fact that I've just taken on the role of mentoring three senior women academics who have ambitions to learn more about the university and to enhance their role within it.  Each of them wants to know more about what I do, and a blog seemed to me to be a way of helping that understanding.  But blogging seems to me intrinsically narcissitic, and based on a premise that the world out there is really interested in what the blogger is saying and doing.   In a world with an excess of information I'm not at all sure that that is true in my case.  I don't feel that it is naturally part of me to push myself forward in quite this way.  And perhaps I should challenge the idea that people out there MIGHT be interested in the life of a PVC - which is inevitably quite a long way removed from the lives of most people in the university, even though it intersects with theirs in many small ways.  I know of only two people who have been reading these posts - one of them being Dave Speake from CiCs who kindly responded on Wednesday to my bleat about the temporary non-availability of uSpace.  Maybe others will discover this series of reflections over the course of the next three weeks and indicate that in some way what I've said has been of interest.  Maybe people will tell me to stop completely - or to approach the task in a different way.   Any suggestions will be welcomed - even if it means that this could be the 'last post.'  Otherwise I intend to come back to the file in the second half of February.

One of the great pleasures of my PVC job that was unexpected when I started in 2004 has been the creation of the network of friends I have made amongst those doing the same role in other universities.  In September 2004 a Russell Group PVC L/T network was formed, and we have had twice-yearly meetings ever since - originally taking over a small hotel in a village near Swindon, but more recently becoming peripatetic and going round the home cities of our universities (I hosted such a meeting in Sheffield in March 2007).  More recently I have taken up the role of co-chair of the PVC L/T network of the Higher Education Academy - again with twice yearly meetings, although held in London.

As PVCs L/T it could be thought that we are all competing for our respective universities. In fact we have a lot in common, and a lot to be gained from talking together about how we are tackling a number of major issues.  We all have interactions with the QAA, with the HEA, and with UUK's Europe Unit over the implementation of the Bologna Process, to name but a few.  And we have all had to respond to recommendations such as those of the Burgess review on degree classification.  Within the Russell Group we all face similar challenges in ensuring that teaching agendas and concerns get their rightful share of attention in the face of research pressures.  It is good to have a network of colleagues who I can phone up to find out how they have tackled a particular problem, and from time to time e-mail messages go out around the whole group in the attempt to build up a comparative picture of actions being taken on some agenda item facing us all.

Our meetings have also attracted significant participants as guests: the HEA network meeting I co-chaired in London in November had Phil Willis MP (Chair of parliament's Select Committee on Innovation, Universities and Skills) and the new Chief Executive of the Quality Assurance Agency (Anthony Maclaran) among the speakers.  Guests at Russell Group meetings have included Bill Rammell, David Willetts, Michael Arthur (as Chair of the Russell Group) and Ruth Deech (then Head of the Office of the Independent Adjudicator - the Ombudsman for Higher Education).

Today my new PVC colleague at Nottingham, Saul Tendler, came to visit me and we exchanged experiences on a wide range of issues including actions in the face of NSS results, initial professional development courses for new lecturers, teaching innovation, and views on the current consultation on the national system of quality assurance.  Joined by Jackie Gresham, the Head of LeTS, we toured the Information Commons and the CILASS spaces there - and as is customary Jackie and I received warm praise, on behalf of the university, for the IC concept and its design. I have lost count of how many visitors from other universities we have now had to the IC, and there has been nothing but commendation for what we have created there.  I was delighted last week that our students had voted our library and opening hours the best in the UK in a Times Higher Survey - and pleased also that our Marketing Team got that onto the unviersity home page so quickly (if for too short a period!).

Richard Jones (PVC Research) and I both have these extended networks outside the university - as also do the Vice-Chancellor, the Registrar, the Director of FInance (Bob Rabone), the Academic Secretary (Claire Baines) and the Director of HR (Rosie Valerio).  It is unfortunate that the Faculty PVCs do not have access to such networks - in part because Sheffield now structures its executive team rather differently from many other universities, and in part also because there is more natural competition with other institutions for the best students and for research income at Faculty level.

This evening I attended the welcome party, held in the Students' Union, for the newly-arrived January entry cohort into Sheffield International College - amounting to around 200 students.  From my point of view this necessitated a short speech and provided the chance to meet a number of students who have the aspiration to succeed in SIC and move into the University in September.  I managed to speak to students from China, Libya, Iran, Pakistan and Nigeria among others.  Something that I am keen to do is to spread the understanding more widely around the university of how important SIC is to us.  Yesterday I received data to show that 26% of our new overseas undergraduates in 2009 came to us via SIC, along with 11% of our new overseas postgraduate taught programme entry.

I spent two and a half hours at a training session today. I was sceptical beforehand about doing so - the session was on something that I have done regularly for many years, and which I feel confident and comfortable about doing.  But (and I've found this before with similar sessions) by the end I had been led to reflect on the skills I bring to the task in hand, and I hope I will incorporate the results of that reflection in my future actions.  The 'trainer' (from HR) pitched the session at the right level for a mixed (although relatively senior) group within the university, but what was also good was the opportunity to thinbk collectively with others in the room about issues we all face.

Our previous Vice-Chancellor, Bob Boucher, was always very keen to ensure that even senior managers (perhaps especially senior managers!) undertook regular training and career development activities. It isn't so much the fact of learning something new, but being encouraged to reflect on one's existing practice that is so important.  That is also why I welcome peer observation of teaching.  Every year since the scheme was introduced I have welcomed a colleague to watch me take a class (sometimes a lecture, sometimes a seminar) and then to discuss what I was doing.  Sometimes the discussions have been over simple but important matters ("do you realise that no one can read your handwriting when you write summary points on the overhead projector after a class discussion"); on other occasions they have been around significant approaches such as the question of whether I use too many personal anecdotes to try to bring colour to my teaching on social geographical topics in Europe.  (The outcome of our joint reflections was that I didn't, and that the anecdotes, instead of seeming like name-dropping and reminiscing, help to humanise what are otherwise quite large-scale and weighty topics.)  Similarly I have always found it helpful to me (and hopefully to them too) to observe and talk through colleagues' teaching.  To me this is at the heart of what some educationalists would call 'being a reflective practitioner.' I'm all for that.

This morning I arrived at work shortly after eight intending to spend an hour or so on uSpace quickly re-reading all the papers for a significant meeting this afternoon, only to find that uSpace was down - and it remained so for some time, only coming back shortly after nine.  I won't say that I panicked, but I was getting anxious that I would have to revert to calling the originating department for the meeting and asking them to send me e-mail pdf attachments which I could then print out and take to the meeting - and I knew there were several hundred pages of documents.  Utlimately all was fine and I took my laptop to the meeting and kept the relevant papers open throughout.  But it was reminder of how incredibly dependent we have become on technology, and how we don't always have back-up plans if it falls over.

Last night I was talking with two colleageus from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities (a historian and a philosopher) and we got to musing over the ways in which information searching has become dominated by technological solutions which lead the researcher straight to the keyword they have typed in or the on-line reference.  This is all very laudable, yet the downside is the lack of the possibility of the serendipitous discovery of something a little offbeat but relevant, or of being sent off on a new train of enquiry as a result of being attracted to another item on the same shelf.  The historian was in some ways lamenting the downside of the digitalisation of newspaper archives such that the researcher can no longer experience the materiality of the document, or read it in the way that people of the past would have read it - skipping between items on a page and taking in the trivial as well as the significant.

This has been a long day - leaving home at 0800 and returning at 2130 without a proper break.  One of the main tasks (self-imposed) was to spend 4 hours in revision tutorials with students taking my final year option class (GEO323 Social Geography of Europe) who are coming up to their examination on 5 February - the last day of the examination season. (That will actually put me and my fellow marker, Frans Schrijver, under some pressure to complete our marking against a tight departmental deadline.)

Final year Geography students undertake a 40 credit research dissertation, handed in also on 5 February.  The existence of this 40 credit block means that they only take one taught module during the first semester of their final year.  Although there is one-to-one supervision for the dissertations, many students go through whole weeks without seeing their supervisor.  Such students have thus only had 3 hours per week of staff contact time throughout one semester - which I regard as too little.  The vast majority of students need more structrue in their working lives than is provided by a three-hour class on a Friday afetrnoon (which is when my option has been running).  With a class of 24, Frans and I have been using a variety of methods to seek direct engagement with the students, and to encourage peer and group learning.  We have been using the facilities of CILASS Collaboratory 3 (in Bartlomé House) and students have been asked to do different things each week, including searching and analysing statistical databases of European social survey results; developing a joint wiki on a key topic; holding a political debate; producing designs for web sites; and making 'old-fashioned' Powerpoint presentations.  All of these things go down very well, and in the formal evaluation in December the module scored very highly on student satisfaction.  But the level of real individual discussion possible was limited and accordingly I offered, as an experiment, to create a series of tutorial sessions (maximum 4 students per session) to help students hone their skills in structuring arguments.  I was also aware that because of the timing of the exam students would have no staff contact for around 7 weeks prior to it taking place.  The sessions on offer were quickly filled up and I have had to create extras.  Hence I have now embarked on what will be around 12 hours of such tutorials over the next two weeks - with 4 today.

What is dismaying is how little opportunity the students have had to engage in real discussion in this relatively intensive fashion.  It is chastening to see how grateful they are to be given this chance.  The acuity of understanding and vision varied between groups, but in all cases there was real participation, and a willingness to chance arguments and see where they might run.  For me there was also the opportunity to have my own views challenged and new questions posed of my understanding of topics that have been central to my research and teaching for years.  One of the huge benefits to active researchers seems to me to be in participating in discussion with students who challenge us to see things in different ways.  My own sewn-up perceptions of key issues have often been taken apart in this way and I have then had to reassemble them in new ways, generally after some more gathering of evidence and an extended period of reflection.  I don't think that happened today, but it may well do over the next couple of weeks.

Another major task today was to chair a brainstorming meeting of the Admissions and Outreach Sub-Committee around what the university's undergraduate bursary offer should be in the future.  We decided our current bursary structure in 2005, before the introduction of deferred fees, and much has changed since.  In 2005 we decided to offer 'achievement bursaries' for those with the best A level grades - and to do so differentially so as to try to attract students into subjects such as Engineering, Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, Archaeology, and Information Studies - subjects which at the time were not recruiting well.

But one effect of this 'bribe' (as it was called by some at the meeting) to take certain subjects has been that we have been paying bursaries to a number of students from wealthy family homes (and not just to those from widening participation backgrounds, as is theoretically supposed by the terms of our Access Agreement).  The Student Union Council has recently put on record its opposition to these bursaries to priority subjects on the grounds that they are divisive.  Demand is now buoyant in subjects where 5 years ago it was stagnant, and arguably there is now no need for such targeted bursaries.

After a wide-ranging discussion it was agreed that we need to do some modelling of alternative scenarios.  One would be to provide a low level achievement bursary for all students from low income households - irrespective of the subject they come to study.  Another would be to scrap all bursaries other than our main income-contingent bursary and then raise the levels of that. 

We need to make some headroom because we have decided that next session we will introduce a busrary for students from low-income households taking postgraduate taught programmes.  An issue that has been recently highlighted by various reports is that many such students set off along the undergraduate degree that will lead them to entry to a profession such as the law or town planning, but then cannot go beyond the undergraduate stage of training because no financial support is available for the postgraduate course that is essential for accreditation and a relevant graduate job.  Introducing bursaries for such students will obviously increase costs, and we want to rationalise undergraduate bursaries accordingly.

Readers of this blog post may like to add their own comments on these issues.

Sunday 17th January 2010 - Sunday 'rules' and the week ahead

As usual on a Sunday afternoon, I have spent the whole period since lunch reading through the papers for meetings that are forthcoming in the first part of the week, as well as commenting on documents that a variety of people have sent me for approval before they are operationalised.  It would be very easy, with the possibility of working from home via computer, to allow the whole weekend to be taken up by repeated bouts of e-mail checking. But I make it a rule that unless I have some specific university function to attend or a specific message comes through to my mobile (as happens occasionally from the media team relating to enquiries from the press for a quote for a Sunday paper) I don't open my e-mails or read any work papers on a Saturday or on a Sunday morning.  It's important to take some time to switch off.

Looking at my diary for the coming week shows a number of interesting items coming up - including a series of revision classes for my final year option students; a number of committee meetings to attend (mostly to chair) on topics such as university admissions policy, senior promotions, and the costing of research and teaching activities for our annual return to the funding council (HEFCE); a visit from my newly-appointed opposite number at the University of Nottingham; and a welcome session for students who have just arrived at Sheffield International College and who, if they are successful there, will be entering the university in the autumn.  All being well (and time permitting) this week's blog entries may deal with a number of these events.