I went to the Union Shop to buy a sandwich today. The whole foyer area was very quiet, but I was thinking about a recent occasion when it was thronged with people.  I don't know how many people reading this blog know about the great 'Lip Dub' event.  A couple of weeks ago almost all the Students Union societies organised their members to lip synch two songs - one by Queen and the other by Take That - while dancing, acting and various other things related to their society.  What is more amazing is that the resultant film lasts just under 7 minutes and was taken as a single shot with the camera tracking right through the Union Building, down into Bar 1, out into the garden, through the Interval, into the Atrium area and back to the front entrance.  Anyone who hasn't seen it is strongly recommended to have a look at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL_ju4E1NHQ

or search on Youtube under 'lip dub sheffield'.  Although it's only been posted on the site for around 10 days the video has already had around 11,000 hits.

Students can organise far more innovative means of communications than many around the university (possibly including many academics) realise.  Another student communications exercise that I've been a fan of for some time consists of the video diaries made over the last four years by a Sheffield student who calls herself 'Laurbubble'.  I'm not sure whether I should give her real name, but suffice to say that she is now a final year student in Germanic Studies, having spent her third year abroad.  Laurbubble has been making video diaries since she arrived at Sheffield, and has a very engaging way of putting her point across - as well as excellent video-editing skills.  She has made 74 videos (as of today), some of which have received over 30,000 hits.  I will recommend three here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMoZIUl0BMY

which is her advice to new first year students, 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1o4R1xfHw4&feature=related

which contain her reflections on types of fresher students, and finally

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL_ju4E1NHQ&feature=fvsr

which is a reflection on her first week in Germany on her exchange year.

For the final class in my third year option I said that student groups could choose their own way of putting across the material they had researched.  The topic was the eays in which high status migrant groups are changing the ways of life in major European cities (Japanese in London, British in Paris etc.).   I expected that most would use Powerpoint - in which they had become expert during the semester. Or they would produce a slide pack (as used by the UK Civil Service in briefing ministers).  But amongst the things I got were: a scripted series of dialogues involving a high status Japanese migrant in London ringing his boss in Tokyo; a role play discussion by three British female migrants including one who was about to return to the UK with her two teenage children; a piece of high quality desk-top publishing of a leaflet; and an extended pitch of a business case for the setting up of a web site aimed at British expats in Saint Petersburg.  All of these contributions were full of interest and relevance to the overall topic.

Perhaps I should more often give my students the opportunity to go 'off piste' and determine their own means of communication.  Oh, and 30,000 hits for a video looks pretty good as an impact statement for the forthcoming REF!

That's it for 2011.  I started this blog in January 2010 with the intention that it would last only a year.  Last December I asked for votes on whether it should continue, and you gave it the thumbs up.  I rather enjoy doing it, so I'm going to continue into next year - unless I see that the readership statistics are consistently going down.  Happy Christmas to all readers.

I don't remember hearing the phrase 'away day' until about 15 years ago.  Perhaps they had taken place before then but I was unaware of them.  When we had significant discussions in my department, for example about curriculum change, we set up a small group (what we would now call a 'task and finish' group - although that was another phrase we didn't use at the time) and they reported to a normal staff meeting.

The first away day I remember being involved in took place at Whirlow Conference Centre on Ecclesall Road South.  Since then I've attended a number of others, the most exotic destination being Hassop Hall.  But I remember arriving at Cagliari Airport in Sardinia some years ago to attend a conference at the university and discovering that most of the other passengers on my flight from Gatwick were employees of Richard Branson's Virgin businesses on their way to a 2-day 'away day' in a beach resort.  As far as I know the University has never run to that sort of event, although I have heard of departments (in the past!) going to Scarborough.

Today I was at an awayday at Halifax Conference Centre on Endcliffe Vale Road, and I found that there were other similar events to the one I was attending going on there as well.  In total quite a lot of people from around the university were engaged in 'awaydaying'.  A question that occurs to me is whether the expense of using a day is ultimately worth it.  'Work expands to fill the time available' is sometimes called 'Parkinson's Law'.  If that 'law' is true it would be interesting to evaluate the results of awaydays against the question of whether they could be achieved in a shorter time period - such as a normal meeting. 

Once upon a time I worked out the value of an hour's staff time for various grades of staff, and wrote the list up as a table in the front of my notepad.  I'd then occasionally look round a group of people in a discussion and work out roughly how much the session was costing.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was a generally linear relationship whereby the most expensive meetings were dealing with the least important matters - and vice versa.  Although I have certainly been involved in some very productive away days in my time, and today's was of consdierable interest, I remain to be convinced that they are all of value.   Yet they have became a standard part of the university's toolkit of collaborative discussion and decision-making.

This time last year I complained that although I had spent a very long time marking the projects submitted by my final year students, and had written a lot of supportive feedback on them, when I gave them the chance to reflect on my comments many of them only wanted to look at the final mark and then walk away.  As I made clear after various comments had been posted by readers, this was a summative piece of coursework, and formative feedback on a draft had been available prior to the work being submitted.

This time I have done something different.  I offer it up for others to comment on.

It takes me about 30 minutes to read and comment on a 2500 word project.  In producing my comments this year I wrote a lot (as usual) - both as marginal comments throughout the script, and as a final set of comments with recommendations to all stduents on who they might improve. (I think it's important to do that for everyone, even if they have already reached a high standard.)  This year I did not add a final mark to the script.

I then gave all students their essays back, along with a small slip of paper.  They had to collect the essays in class according to their registration number, since I did not have their names.  I gave them 15 minutes during which time they had to read through all my comments.  And I told them that I would only give them the mark for their essay once they had handed in the slip of paper with the mark that they expected to have been awarded in the light of the comments they had received. 

My rationale in doing this was to get them to think further about criteria for assessment, and the relationships between the extnet to which one meets the criteria and the final mark.  If they had not understood what I was getting at with my comments there would be a very low correlation between their expected mark and the actual: if they HAD understood my comments then there would be a clsoe relationship.

One student gave her/himself 41 when the actual mark was 61. I suspect that was because although I had been critical of the standard of presentation the content had been good, and the student concerned misunderstood the overall criteria.   Only two students were brave enough to award themselves firsts (the higher at 72) when in fact there were half a dozen firsts in the group of 36 students, with the highest mark at 84.

But overall there was a very high degree of correlation between their marks and mine.  With the exceptions of the cases I've just mentioned, everyone was within 5 marks of the mark awarded.  And the general feeling was that this was a good way of making students think further about the marking process, and what they can learn by considering the feedback given.

I'd be interested in others comments on this.

I am the co-convenor of the Higher Education Academy's network of Pro-Vice-Chancellors for Learning and Teaching.  We meet twice a year, with the normal pattern being an evening dinner with a guest speaker, followed by a day of discussions, talks and other activities after an overnight stay.   Today was that day.  We had around 35 at dinner last night, and 55 at today's sessions.

Last night our speaker at dinner was Lord Kenneth Baker. Older readers will remember him as a Scretary of State for Education in the 1979-1997 conservative government.  He is now a leader of the Baker-Dearing Trust which is seeking to reinvigorate technical education in schools in England.  What it is actually doing is setting up new 'University Technology Colleges' for pupils aged 14-19.  We in Sheffield have recently won a bid to set up one of these, jointly with Sheffield Hallam.

But it is not Ken Baker's speech last night that I want to talk about.  Our discussions today included a round table consideration of the possible effects of the current changes to fees and number controls for the student experience.  As always, I greatly enjoy being in a mixed group of colleagues from across the whole of Higher Education.  In my group were colleagues from a university offering programmes only to adult learners, a London university with a very high proportion of postgraduate students, a small church-founded university, a big post-92, and me from a Ruseel Group institution.  here are some of our conculsions:

1. It is going to be very difficult to retain diversity within individual universities.  We will see some become even more predominantly widening participation focused than at present, while others become more exclusive in entry standards and in social class mix.  The latter will have very few mature students.

2. A much higher proportion of stduents will study at their nearest university - a point that links very closely to that below.  And movement across the national boundaries within the four parts of the UK will diminish.  For instance, the current Welsh policy of paying the difference between the standard Welsh university fee and that charged in the desitination university for Welsh students who go elsewhere in the UK will rapidly prove unsustainable so that Welsh students will increasingly be limited to Wales, Scots to Scotland, and so on.

3. The subjects on offer within individual universities will become more limited.  Cross-subsidisation from one subject area to another will becoem elss acceptable to students in a period of transparency.  Subject areas will close and institutions will focus their efforts in a smaller range of areas.  For less mobile students (see point 3 above) this will hugely restrict choice.  That will be paradoxical in a period when government rhetoric is about increasing choice.

4. Dynamism in university course offerings will diminish.  Students will make cases that what attracted them to institution x was the range of final year courses, and when they get to that level they will find that the courses have changed and they will feel aggrieved.  There will be many challenges to change.

5. Postgraduate taught programmes will bn ecome the preserve of overseas students, with only minimal numbers of home students - except in areas where there is an immediate and direct link into employment.  But in such areas the competition from private providers will be intense - as it already is for postgraduate training in Law.

It's a depressing prospect.