Well, this is it.  I set out in January to produce a blog on six consecutive days each month throughout the year. And, a little to my surprise, I've pretty well managed to achieve that.  There have been a few days when I have been on leave - but my major holidays during the year (and I do take holidays - they are very necessary) happen not to have coincided with blogging weeks. I have generally managed to get to the keyboard late each evening, although there have been occasions when the entry has been written up the following morning.

The original reason for starting this was because I was involved in the mentoring scheme whereby members of UEB (and the academics on UEB are all male - although, as they say, watch this space for an announcement very shortly) have been attempting to help senior academic women to experience aspects of the wider governance structures of the university and of the life of PVCs.  At the time I started I had three such mentees: that number has now grown to four and although the obligations of the scheme itself have now been completed for this session I intend to keep being available for 'my four' into the future.

I have tried each day to pick on something that is of more general interest.  I hope that in doing that I have been able to demonstrate the incredible variety of a PVC's life - particularly one in a cross-cutting role such as I have.  Yes: the hours can often be long.  Yes: the demands can be considerable.  But the rewards are often immense - a feeling that one is actually making a difference to the life of the university and, more importantly, to the lives of those who are engaged with it, students, staff and others from outside our community.  The highlights outweigh the tedious elements many times over.

In this final blog of the year I want to pay tribute to two sets of people who make this university so special.  These are not the obvious 'stars', Instead they are the middle ranking colleagues - in academic departments and in professional services - who believe in the mission of the university, who see their own career developing in parallel with the stability and quality of the university, and who are the 'boiler-room' of the enterprise.  These are the academic staff who will turn their hand to anything that is in the interests of their students, who will chase the research grants that might extend the research support contracts of colleagues, who will turn out for outreach and for alumni events, and who take pride in what they, their students and their departments are achieveing.  They are the staff in acacdemic departments and in professional services who are determined that everything should run smoothly, who stay after hours to get the exam marks in or the timetables finalised, who are available on the phone to deal with emergencies and incidents of all kinds, and whose attitude to any request is to try to find a way of fulfilling it.

But my second tribute is to the officers of the Union of Students.  Every year a series of wacky candidates stand for election, and on almost every occasion the winners are actually an incredibly mature and responsible bunch.  They are extremely well trained by the permanent union officials, and they become some of the best advocates of the university.  The Union has been run by two outstanding teams of officers during the period I have been writing this blog. And those teams have worked with me and other UEB colleageus in an incredibly co-operative manner.

But is this actually to be the end?  I started the year with the intention that I would finish in December. But some people have asked me to continue. I am going to put that to the vote.  Your chance to put your opinions can be found in a Survey Monkey questionnaire.  Please answer it to give me your verdict one way or another.

  http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/2D8WLSV

Happy Christmas to everyone.

The Information Commons has a new manager, and he and I met up this morning.  The IC has been one of the most successful capital projects the university has undertaken for a number of years, and it has established a key role in many aspects of student life - both as workspace and as social hub.  I chaired the Project Executive Group that oversaw the project - although the credit for the vision has to go to the Directors of Library Services and CiCS (Martin Lewis and Chris Sexton) and their staff, and to my predecessor as PVC L/T, Phil Jones.  We built the IC in the hope that stduents would use it in the way we expected - and in reality almost everything we planned for has come to fruition.

The IC has created a new way of working, and the question now is - what next?  How will students work in five or ten years time?  The fact is that we don't know.  But I am sure there will be differences from now. The IC was built to bring together IT and a bookstock.  How long will the IT need to be PCs?  Over 80% of new students arrive in Sheffield with a laptop, but few carry them around with them.  What if we encouraged students to move onto iPads or other tablet computers?  Perhaps we should issue students with an iPad at registration, preloaded with a mass of materials that we currently provide in paper copy.  Could we dispense with PCs in the IC (and elsewhere) and expect students to use their own equipment (which have issued to them)?  What about the future of blended learning?  Might we be delivering more course materials electronically in a few years time - and I am not simply thinking of the stuff that is put in the MOLE repository.  What use will students be making of books in a few years time? We are already at the position where many students have never physically opened a journal, accessing all the articles electronically.

There is a need for more spaces in which students can undertake the sort of activities they currently do in the IC.  But we need to be imaginative in order to future-proof any investment we make in such spaces.  Getting it right is not guarantee.

But on the top of all the technology, one of the simplest things students like about the IC is the 24/7 opening.   And that in itself is an indication of the way in which student work patterns have changed from previous decades when the demarcation betwen the work and leisure parts of the student day was much clearer.

I went to an inaugural lecture this evening.  It was held in the ICOSS conference room, which was nearly full.  It was a good lecture - well paced, not too technical (it was by an economist), and well introduced by the head of department.  Most people stayed on for refreshment and conversation afterwards.

But the ICOSS conference room only holds around 60 people, and apart from me and three others I couldn't recognise anyone from a department other than Economics.

I believe the inaugural lecture is an excellent potential occasion for people from all parts of the university to come together to celebrate the breadth of interests in the institution, and for all of us to learn something about disciplines that we may not normally delve into. The well-judged inaugural acts as a showcase for the lecturer but also for the subject that he or she comes from.  It enables others to grasp something of key research areas and to understand where a subject is going.  It prevents us all becoming too narrowly focused on our own concerns, and reminds us of the excellent work going on all round the university.  It gives us all something to boast about.

But clearly my views are not shared by many.  Perhaps we are all in danger of becoming too specialised, of not recognising the breadth of academia, of assuming that lectures in fields other than our own will be too technical and incomprehensible, that we have better things to do with our time.  I acknowledge, of course, that there has been a massive rise in recent years in the number of new appointments to professorships - such that running an institution-wide inaugural lecture programme has become impossible.  But I would certainly like to see each Faculty choosing, say, three new professors each year who, in their judgement, could act as ambassadors for that Faculty's endeavours, with real publicity and a certain level of expectation raised that inaugurals are interesting, useful, instructive - and can potentially lead to new ideas for collaboration with people in fields distant from ones own. Fifteen such lectures across the university in a year would only mean one every fortnight during the 30 week teaching period. I certainly wouldn't be able to get to all of them, but I'm sure some would fit my diary.

But I have a further thought.  Inaugurals are given by new professors.  What about a parallel series given by the star turns who achieved their chairs some time ago and have continued to grow in reputation since.  I never heard Ian Kershaw lecture on Nazi Germany, despite working in the same university as him for 20 years: I never heard Fred Combley lecture on nuclear physics, or Paul Wiles on criminology.  Among present-day colleagues I am sure Tim Birkhead could fill a lecture hall with a university-wide lecture on bird behaviour, or Danny Dorling on social inequalities, or Sheila McNeill on tissue engineering .. and so on.  So if we were to have 15 selected inaugurals during the year at fortnightly intervals, what about interspersing them with lectures from our most distinguished established professorial stars?

We had the University carol service in the Octagon today - attended by, I was told later, around 350 people.  Of all events in the year this has probably the most diverse set of people present - students, academic staff, support staff from acacdemic departments, staff from professional services, and a number of retired or ex colleagues who return for the occasion.  It's an unusually all-encompassing celebration.  Prayers and lessons were read by a variety of representatives of different groups - students, the Students Union (a lesson read by the President, Josh Forstenzer), academic departments (a senior colleague from Archaeology): Phil Harvey, the Registrar, and I also read lessons. The Professor of English Language played the organ; the Students' Union chamber choir sang.  And the multi-faith chaplaincy team did their bit - the service was organised by the Methodist chaplain, the Anglican chaplain read a lesson, and the Roman Catholic chaplain gave an address.  And in that address Peter Cullen, the RC chaplain, celebrated the multi-faith chaplaincy and its work across all major world religions.

The links between organised religion and the university are complex.  We were founded as a secular institution in the sense that there would be no religious test for either staff or students.  We were built without a chapel or other place of worship.  Yet we now have one of the broadest and most successful multi-faith chaplaincies of a British university. We seek to enable those of any faith or none to feel part of the university community and to respect those around them who choose other personal paths through life. Students and staff within the university recognise and celebrate Eid, Hannukah, Diwali and other significant calendar dates for particular groups.  We have Islamic prayer rooms on campus, and we have a chaplaincy centre and  links to a variety of religious establishments within the city.

I am glad that is the case.  Strident voices are sometimes raised today against religion and against belief.  Religions are accused of breeding intolerance towards each other.  A university should be a place of searching, and the demographic structures and spirit of enquiry of a university population are such that many people are developing their own views on the world around them.  Something I think I can take a little credit for is the inter-faith tandem learning exercise that can make up part of a Sheffield Graduate Award portfolio.  Students undertaking this exercise are paired such that they represent different religious traditions or beliefs. They are then given tasks to explain to each other their understandings of major life-changing events, the ways in which their religious culture celebrates particular activities, or the ways in which secularisation has nevertheless left traces of former religious positions within common standards of morality.  I sponsored these exercises when they were first thought up, and I remain a believer in their potential for developing further cross-cultural understanding within our diverse university.  Perhaps it is over-ambitious, but I would like our overseas Islamic students, by the time of graduation, to have some awareness of what Christianity in the UK is about; but I would equally like our often secular UK students to have developed some real understanding of Islam or Buddhism. And I would like all parts of the community to be able to celebrate their own beliefs freely but without proselytizing.  'Awareness and tolerance' would be a good motto.

Warning: this is going to be a bit of a grumble - and about students.

There is a great deal of angst about feedback to students on their performance. Student leaders and politicians call for more feedback, given more quickly, and aimed at improving student understanding and future performance.  I have argued that too often the way we mark scripts and essays is aimed at justifying the mark we award rather than helping students to improve.  We need to take the time to help students make effective use of feedback.  Against a fair bit of opposition, last summer I got a proposal through Senate that sets a series of standards for the provision of feedback to students.  I have been keen to improve my own offering of feedback in my teaching.

Last month 24 out of the 25 students in my final year class handed in projects of around 8-10 sides each. I dutifully marked them, paying great attention to making marginal comments that would explain issues where individuals had gone wrong or where alternative viewpoints might have been covered.  I wrote copiously on the cover sheets, adding an extra section to the standard headings labelled 'To improve' and on every essay (even that which I awarded a provisional mark of 84 to) I suggested how the student could have obtained a higher mark. I spent a long time on this marking task.

Ten days ago I spread the essays out on a table during my class and invited everyone to find their own (the anonymous numbers had not yet been decoded).  I suggested they might like to read through my marginal comments on the essays and gave them 10 minutes to do so, as well as to read the overall summary and the suggestions for improvement.  I also offered to see any student who wanted to discuss their essay and my comments, and indicated that I would particularly welcome the chance to talk to students whose marks had disappointed them. (Since there was at least one Third and some Lower Seconds I assumed some stduents would fall into that category).

The students descended on the table and found their own essays.  But within 2 minutes most had finished with them.  Several didn't even bother to take their essay out of its slip case - instead simply looking at the numerical mark and not even reading the comments I had laboured over to help them improve for the future, or my marginal comments which remained unseen by them.  I don't think that a single student used the opportunity to read through everything that I had written on their essay, either in the margin or on the cover sheet.

Since then one student has been to see me to talk about his essay - and we had a very good conversation that I hope was of help to him: he had a 58 and wants to lift his performance into the Upper Seconds. Two further students made appointments to see me today to go through their essays, but then failed to show up.

Yet I guess that when these students fill in the National Student Survey later this session many of them will say that they didn't get prompt feedback, that it wasn't detailed, and that it didn't assist their understanding.

Here's a hypothesis: When students answer questions about their satisfaction with feedback they read them as if they are about their satisfaction with their marks. If they get a mark they like they think it's good feedback: if they get a mark they are disappointed with they think it's poor feedback.  They are not principally interested in feedback at all, but in the mark they receive.  The trouble is, I'm not sure how to test my hypothesis.  But I'd be interested in other people's comments on the idea.

I'm starting this last week of blogging after a shorter gap than usual, because otherwise there will be a very truncated set of posts during the week up to Christmas. Anyway, there's a lot going on across the university - as has also been the case over the last three weeks since I last made a post.  During that period I seem to have acted as PVC for snow, PVC for occupations, PVC for liasison with the Students' Union and a variety of other tasks. 

The PVC for snow task involved the Registrar and me being given the responsibility for making twice daily decisions (at 0630 and 1830) about the opening of the university for teaching activities during the half day but one to come.  I am not used to surfing the Met Office website and looking at local travel information at 6 in the morning, but there we are.

The PVC for occupations was a longer-term task - and one which had already started when I wrote my blog last month.  It took up a lot of time, and at one point I found myself driving down to the university on a Sunday afternoon to make a statement in front of a rally of around 150 people taking place in the occupied Richard Roberts lecture theatre - a new experience.

The House of Commons vote on tutiton fees has now taken place.  A lot of the emphasis in the debate has been around the likely impact on students from widening participation backgrounds, and the likelihood that they will be put off by their own debt-aversion and their unwillingness to see the fees bill clocking up against their names as they go through university.  Actually, I think that there is another measure being pushed through that is likely to be far more damaging to widening participation in higher education than the new fees regime - the elimination of the Educational Maintenance Allowance which pays up to £30 per week for every 16-19 year old in education who comes from a low-income household.  That sum is crucial in keeping many young people in education and thus providing the route for them to apply for entry to university.  If they don't stay on beyond the age of 16 they are largely lost to the HE sector - at least for some time to come.  The college where I am a governor - which has the third poorest catchment in England on some indicators - has around 75% of its students in receipt of EMA.  The 'more targeted' support that is being posited as a replacement to EMA will almost certainly reduce that to a very low level - or will result in much smaller payments being made.  Families will encourage their young people without EMA to get any sort of job to supplement household income.  Therein lies a very worrying possibility for this country, and for the future development of widening participation and the inclusive nature of higher education.