Tuesday 17th December 2013 - How I teach

It's the time of the semester when we as lecturers get the feedback from our students on what they think of the courses we have been teaching.  I have had a class of 25 students this semester, taking a final year module entitled 'The Social Geography of Europe'.   I have an account with SurveyMonkey so I can instantly see how the evaluation responses are piling up: over two thirds have now filled in what is quite a long evaluation sheet.  So far it's all looking very positive.  But yesterday one of the students said to me "Your teaching is very contemporary.  You should tell others what you do."  I took 'contemporary' to mean that we dealt with contemporary issues, but he explaned that he meant that I used a variety of different teaching methods including some that he thought quite up-to-date (he was probably surprised given my age!).  Anyway, here's my response to his request for me to tell other people what I do, in the form of a diary.  For those who aren't interested in the ways I teach, stop now and wait for the next blog to come along!

Week minus 4.  I send all registered students a document identifying the major social science theories and concepts they should understand from previous years' work, with some comment on how these ideas will relate to the empirical material in the class.  I ask them to revise their understanding of these ideas because I will take for granted that they are up to speed on them.  I also recommend  a series of newspapers and web sites to monitor throughout the class, given that we will be looking at issues that appear daily in the newspapers.

Week minus 1. I send all the students a set of 21 personality questions.  This is not a full Myers-Briggs analysis or equivalent, but their answers enable me to discover something about their personalities on a number of different axes - innovation, self-confidence, task orientation etc.  I can then use the results to put them in groups for team work - varying the group compsoition and group leaders week by week.  In the early sessions the group leaders are always those who have scored high on leadership potential, but towards the end of the semester I ensure that others with lower scores take on the leader role as well.  In some weeks I need to spread those with high innovation scores around because I am asking them to do something particularly new.  Over the years I have found that allocating groups on this basis works very well. It also helps to integrate stduents who have 'different' backgrounds - this year there have been three of them, one visiting stduent and two others who spent last year on study abroad and who initially had no friends in the group.  It is only in the very last seminar that I allow students to make up their own groups.

Week 1. There are a couple of short ice-breakers - one of which involves students having to guess which languages I have used in putting 'welcome' up on the screen.   I give a short introductory lecture, but the bulk of the time is spent with students exploring the European Values Survey and producing a commentary on some aspect of the results they find interesting.  I have the use of a teaching room heavily resourced with IT for this class, and students sit round workstations.  I can call up the material from one screen to show to everyone.  Students are asked to submit their work, which is then integrated across all students (with comments from me) and placed on the VLE page for the module.  A further feature of this first session is that I present students with over 25 opinion questions about the issues we are going to tackle in the class and get their responses via 'clickers' using the TurningPoint variant of Powerpoint.  We come back to their answers in week 11.

Week 2.  A further short lecture from me, on the background to the assessed essay questions they will be undertaking.  But again the bulk of the class is taken up by students in pairs exploring data on social issues across Europe from Eurostat.  Work is submitted and placed on the VLE page, as in the previous week.

Week 3.  A final short lecture from me on the background to the essay.  But the main activity this week sees students doing guided research on the reporting and framing of issues around racism and Islamophobia in news media from a variety of European countries.  The resultant Powerpoint slides are then shown to the whole group.  This is the first time when students talk about their work to everyone else publicly.  Towards the end of the session (each is of 3 hours duration) I give a brief introductory lecture on the first seminar topic.

Week 4.  I hold a series of short tutorials on the essay questions. There are four offered, each of them asking students to use comparative methods in looking at a particular issue in two contrasted European countries.  They choose the pairs.  I have no agenda for these tutorials: it is up to students to come with their own essay plans and their questions which they can then share with others doing the same question.

Week 5.  The first of six seminar topics.  In each case the task is given to students two weeks earlier, along with the allocation to groups.  This first seminar is in many ways the most 'conventional'.  It is on changes in Central and Eastern European cities since the end of communism.  Eight sub-themes are allocated and students work in groups to create and make a Powepoint presentation on their sub-theme.  In the class they also do some guided research on specific cities using Google maps.  After the class the Powerpoints are collected and sewn together to create an integrated document (with some light editing from me).  In week 5 I also give a short lecture introducing the topic for week 7.

Week 6.  This week is a reading week for students to work on their essays, which will be submitted at the start of week 7.  For some years now I have arranged students in groups of 3 to exchange their own draft essays amongst themselves, to comment on those they receive, and to receive comments on their own.  When I started doing this I thought students would find the comments they receive to be the most helpful aspect of the exercise.  In fact they generally report that it is being asked to use the assessemnt criteria against someone else's work that they find most useful.

Week 7.  The essays come in.  This year I have gone completely paperless.  The essays were submitted electronically, via Turnitin, as Word documents.  They were then converted to pdfs and moved, via Dropbox, to an app called 'Notability' that I have on my iPad. In this app one can write on documents on screeen, and one can also type longer comments onto the document.  I can therefore mark wherever and whenever I have the time and space.  A sample of marked essays was sent to my second marker for confirmation.  Once all the essays were marked - anonymously - the exams officer in the department broke the code and each essay was sent back to its writer but with one crucial element missing.  I had removed the final numerical mark.  Students could only get their mark by reading through all the comments I had liberally scattered across their text and the summative comments at the end, and writing a reflective paragraph or two for me on what they had learned from these comments. I also asked them to estiamte the mark they would receive.  Only when I had received such an email from a student did I divulge the mark.  Almost all students estimated within 3-4 marks of what the actual mark was - although I couldn't persuade the student who got 82 to push her (I found out later that it was a 'her') estimate above 68 or, at most, 70.

Week 7.  The second seminar.  This is on minority languages in Europe and the Council of Europe Convention on Indigenous Minorities (Catalans, Basques, Welsh and so on).  For this seminar I ask students to prepare 'slide packs' on their allotted language situation.  I learned about slide packs from my daughters in the civil service (see my previous blog).  They are constructed in Powerpoint but in normal font sizes and involve blocks of texts on particular aspects of the issue, interspersed with linking arrows, diagrams etc.  They are used in ministerial briefings and unlike normal Powerpoints they do not need to be read sequentially.  The students first efforts at these were excellent and, from the later evaluation, I know they found them extremely effective in presenting material.  In this seminar, groups studying three or four languages were put together to report to each other on the adherence of governments to the Minorities Convention, and were asked to interrogate the 'others' in their set, very much in the style of inspectors. (I once played the role of rapporteur for such an inspection of Russia's adherence to the covnention.)  We then had a general discsusion about the sustainability of minority languages into the future, with a vote on the strength of each considered. This year it was good news for Catalan and Welsh - and Ladin in northern Italy - but not so good for Frisian and Galician!  As in other seminars, the materials created by the stduents were sewn together to go on the VLE.

Week 8.  This is a role play on the reasons why Yugoslavia broke up, and the unfinished business since then.  Students are divided into delegations representing each of the factions involved (also including Albania, Bulgaria and Greece which have some interests in the whole topic).  The main preparation material students are given is in the form of the web addresses of some of the most nationalist web sites.  But this year I also had assistance from our International Faculty in Thessaloniki and was able to link up Sheffield students with students from various parts of the Balkan Region.  The scenario set is based in early 2014 when a number of events in the Balkans have led to a flare up of tensions again.  On the day of the seminar a colleague plays the part of President Obama and each national group has to explain to him what happened, from their point of view, over the last 25 years or so, and what the outstanding issues are.  Groups are encouraged to challenge each other - which, once they get going, they do with gusto.  They are each given the relevant flag to wave, which helps set the tone.  I sit at the back with a shell presentation I have developed over the years, and I enlarge on this in relation to the points the students make.  When they have finished I then present this as an academic commentary on the whole set of issues, and they are then (and only then) given a series of academic readings to follow up with.  My Powerpoint goes on the VLE.

Week 9.  The topic is on policies to combat social exclusion, particularly affecting ethnic minorities, in European cities.  One group is asked to tease out some of the definitional issues.  One group plays the role of a European Parliamemtary Committee enquiring into the efficacy of policies.  All the other students are in national groups which have been asked to pre-circulate a briefing paper on the approach to social inclusion policies in 'their' country, and then to present a formal policy 'pitch' to the parliamentarians, highlighting a policy they think should be adopted more widely across Europe.  There is a risk that each national group will choose a similar policy, but fortunately this year that did not happen.  I have up my sleeve a Portuguese policy that I can always add to the mix (there is virtually no literature on it in English).  

Week 10.  The topic is the spatial manifestation of historic antagonism to gypsies and Jewish populations across Europe.  This is done through the construction of a wiki, with each group of students initially allocated one section to research and write, and all then to collaborate in writing two final sections and editing the whole.  Most groups work from academic literature, but four used other sources.  One used the list of all traveller sites in the UK to do some analysis of their locational characteristics (for example next to motorways, factories etc.); one researched the recent media coverage of Slovak gypsies in Sheffield and visited Page Hall where the community is concentrated; and two went to London to undertake some observational work in the Jewish neighbourhoods of Golders Green and Stamford Hill.  The wiki to date is over 8000 words long and is still being actively edited.

Week 11. The final topic is on high status migrants in European cities - British in Paris, Japanese in London and so on.  Some of the tasks set here were 'conventional' but others invited the creation of a business plan for the setting up of an expatriate web site, or for an HR Directors' agenda for the establishment of community support for those sent abroad on relocation packages.  One student emailed me to say that she couldn't find any academic reading on her task (how expatriates make use of expatriate web sites) and I responded that it wasn't academic reading I was looking for but academic thinking.  She needed to look at the message boards, blogs and so on and analyse their content from a social scientific perspective.  That is actually very much my philosophy for the whole course - these are third year students who ought to be able to think as social scientists about everyday issues and events.  At the end of the presentation sessions we did two further things.  Firstly I went back to the document I had sent out before the class started, and we identified how the material we had since covered related to those big ideas.  And secondly we repeated the opinion survey from week 1 to see how much students' opinions had shifted, and in some case how much they now knew about things they had had little understanding of 11 weeks earlier.

There remain a series of 'tutorials' that I am running this week and in early January whereby students can come to my room in groups of 4 to go over the approach to the use of the big ideas as keys to understanding the empirical topics we have covered in the course.  What has been particularly exciting this year is that many of those topics have been strongly in the news of late - Slovak Roma issues in Sheffield, the current political protests in the Ukraine, continuing issues over local elections in northern Kosovo.

So that's it.  It's been a long blog - but it had been suggested that I should produce one on this topic.

Monday 9th December 2013 - Universities' attitudes to policy impact

I have two daughters, both of whom work in strategy and policy-creating areas of government ministries in Westminster.  They have a lot of interactions with academics, commissioning research reports and making use of academic opinions and project findings. 

I had dinner with one of my daughters a couple of days ago and she was saying that she had recently received a commissioned research report that was so good that she stayed at her desk until 10 p.m. reading it, making notes on it, and identifying where its conclusions could be used to influence policy directions.  She was clearly bowled over by what the academic colleague had produced - "real policy-relevant research", she said.  And some of it was not based on original material but was more like the synthesis of views that a good etacher produces.

At one time my other daughter was commissioning research regularly from a very well-respected unit at a senior university.  She was frequently reduced to rage by their attitude.  They were constantly missing deadlines, re-directing the research brief so they could get a journal publication out of the work rather than prioritising the needs of the research funder.  They also had little idea of what could be put into practice in a policy context.

I will shortly be involved in the annual round of consideration of possible promotions to readerships and professorships.  For each candidate who is judged to have a reasonable case we seek a number of external referees.  If past experience is anything to go by the referees put forward will all be academics who will make comments on the size of the research grants obtained, the difficulty of winning them, and the quality of the resultant research papers published in major journals.  But in this era when research impact is a significant element of the Research Evaluation Framework I wonder whether it should really be people like my daughters who should be writing references instead.  Their views on the merits of particular individuals might be an interesting corrective to views elsewhere within the university world.  

Tuesday 26th November 2013 - A little knowledge of a language can go a long way

In the debate over making language classes available to all students I have several times heard disparaging remarks to the effect that students should be taught to do more than order a latte or a meal.  (I'll come back at the end to something about the latte.)  The view seems to be that if we are to offer language options to, say, computer scientists or psychologists, physicists or architects, they should learn the language to the level where they can practice their discipline in that tongue.  Let me tell you my own experience.

It may not be much of a claim to make - but for a period of years I believe I was the third best-known British human geographer in Portugal.  I first went to Portugal in 1999 at the invitation of a colleague I had first met as part of a European Science Foundation network 15 years earlier.  I don't like to be in places where I don't speak at least a bit of the language - a 'get by' amount.  I spent a few hours on a Portuguese phrase book and watched part of a BBC language course.  All the proceedings at that first meeting I went to in Lisbon were conducted in English, but I showed to my hosts that I had been prepared to go part way towards them.  Unlike other English-speakers there, I was invited back - and within three or four years I was Principal Investigator on a major research grant from a Portuguese funding body, working to evaluate policies for social exclusion in the poorest neighbourhoods of Lisbon and Oporto.  For some years I maintained close contacts with colleagues in a number of Poruguese universities - Lisbon, the Portuguese Open University, Oporto.  I edited a book with Portuguese colleagues, and one of my last research articles was a two-hander on the ways the UK and Portugal have dealt with issues of citizenship for migrants from ex-colonies.

My Portuguese is still confined to 'get by' standard (although I can now also peruse Portuguese publications and get some sense out of them).  But it was having a 'get by' knowledge of the language that opened up opportunities to me.  On the other hand in the past I have lectured and given conference papers in both French and Italian (although both are now somewhat rusty) and I have passable German. My Portuguese is a classic example of the law of comparative advantage.  That 'law' says that it is better to specialise in the thing where you have the greatest margin over your competitors, than in the thing that you are best at.  I am best at French, but I have the greatest margin over competitors in Portuguese.  English is the international language of science and of commerce, but a get by knowledge of another language can open doors, particularly if it is a tongue that others don't speak.  I would like all our students to have a get by knowledge of a language other than English - and preferably more than one. And if one of those is a language other than those still most commonly spoken by people from the UK then so much the better.  A little Arabic, or Mandarin, or Portuguese, or Russian (all of which we offer as part of 'Languages for All') ca go a very long way.

What about that latte?  Teaching students to be able to operate in Italian would also be a great thing - and they would learn that ordering a latte in Italy will generally bring them a glass of milk.   

Tuesday 12th November 2013 - Research students as lifelong friends

One of the greatest pleasures for an academic of a certain age must surely be meeting up with research students he or she has supervised from some years ago and hearing about what they have been doing.  There is perhaps inevitably a little bit of pride there in feeling (or perhaps hoping) that one helped them along the way.  But there is also the delight in hearing what they are doing now and relating it back to the PhD they completed some years ago.  And in meeting ex-students from the past there is also a reminder of one's own academic trajectory through the topics one was supervising at a particular time (some of which one would now claim no expertise in).

In the last three months I have been fortunate to meet up with three of my ex-PhD students - all now living in other countries.  One lives in Japan, a second a researcher in France, and the third a businessman in Germany.

My earliest research interests were in social and demographic changes in small rural communities, and one of my very first PhD students worked on rural depopulation in post-war Japan.  As an undergraduate he came on a field class I ran in rural Normandy in France, and there is a line of connection from the ideas I introduced him to there, through his PhD, to the fact that he is now a professor in a private unviersity in Japan, with research interests in the history of rural Japan.  He was in Sheffield to give a seminar in our School of East Asian Studies.

I later made a rural-to-urban migration and developed research interests in European cities (a field I have continued to pursue ever since).  One year I supervised an undergraduate dissertation on gentrification in London's Docklands, and the student in question also came on a field class to Paris with me.  On that class she and I decided on specific areas that would merit consideration as examples of the French governmental approach to urban renewal, and she then won a scholarship to pursue that topic.  If we fast forward a number of years, through her employment in the European organisations in Brussels, she is now working on a major European-funded project evaluating the effects of European spending on urban policy.  She was in Sheffield as part of the data-gathering work for her four-city study.

I met my third ex-student for dinner in London where he was on a business trip to evaluate the ways in which his German-owned retail company could break into the UK market.  Over twenty years ago I was flattered that a student from Germany wanted to do his PhD on the residential mobility of Turkish migrant workers in Munich with me in Sheffield, rather than with a German supervisor at a German university.  He could have had a superb academic career here afterwards, had it not been for his revulsion at the populist anti-German sentiment whipped up by news media such as the Daily Mail and the Sun during some international football tournament (I forget which).

All three become friends many years ago.  I have met their partners and (most of) their children. When I was in Japan a few years ago my ex-student covered some distance to meet me and to have dinner together.  I have stayed in the second home that my France-based ex-student now owns in Northern Provence.  I have been entertained and wined and dined in Germany.  And when I met them over the last few weeks, all three without prompting expressed strong positive feelings about what the University of Sheffield had given them, and the overall value of the education (not just the discipline but the wider approach) they had received here.

These rendezvous over the last three months have now led me to try to track down some other ex-students I have lost direct contact with.  It will be interesting now to follow them up!

Wednesday 23rd October 2013 - Powerpoint - for good or ill

Three days gone this week, and I have made three Powerpoint presentations. The Powerpoint has become a ubiquitous tool in many diferent contexts.  I know there are now alternatives, and many people are starting to favour Prezi.  But I haven't yet been at a Prezi presentation that didn't make me feel a little queasy - and on one occasion the whole audience implored the presenter to stop or they would walk out.

What did we do before Powerpoint?  Over the years I have illustrated my lectures by combinations of overhead transparences - some prepared and others written on during the lecture - and 35 mm slides.  My own inaugural lecture as a Professor, back in 1998, was given  with the help of around 25 slides - and an operator sitting in the projection room at the back of Lecture Theatre 4 in the Arts Tower to operate them.  Slides, naturally, required a great deal of preparation, with the submission of material to the photographic technician some days, sometimes some weeks, before the start of a course.  Overhead transparencies were easier to deal with, particularly after the introduction of transparencies that could be put through a photocopier so that existing paper-based material could be copied to them.  (Unfortunately in my department one particular colleague - now retired - never grasped the importance of distinguishing between the heavy-duty transparencies that could be used in the copier and the lighter-weight ones that could not - with resultant melting episodes that also assailed the nostrils and closed the photocopier down for some days.)

Some people talk about 'death by Powerpoint' and it is true that an unending series of slides heavy with text can get very tedious - even more so if the presenter actually then reads the text from the screen.  But overhead transparencies could also be used to overkill effect.  One distinguished colleague (not from this University, but who went on to become VC at two institutions successively) used to arrive to deliver conference papers armed with boxfulls of pre-prepared transparencies including one that he used on a number of occasions in each talk, simply containing the word 'BUT' in large capital letters.  Everything he said was read straight from his transparencies.

So what have my three presentations been this week so far?
1. A presentation to University Council about the year on year change in student numbers in the University, the need to pay close attention to our competitiveness in the current environment, and plans for revising our institutional apporach to what our students get.
2. A lecture to students on the Business, Law and Social Science track at Sheffield International College on the breadth of social sciences, the ened for inter-disciplinarity, and illustrations from one of my own research interests - international migration.
3. A presentation of the University's learning and teaching strategies to a group of newly appointed lecturers from across the University.

On each occasion Powerpoint enabled me to use a combination of photographic images, graphs, tables of data, and words - with varying degrees of emphasis on different elements.  And unlike the 'old days' I didn't have to prepare everything weeks in advance.  The material could be up to the minute - indeed in the case of the Council presentation I was able to update the data that had been ciruclated the week before in the printed version of the papers.

I am not claiming that I am a particularly skilled user of Powerpoint.  But I am an enthusiast for it.  I'm not sure what I for one would do without it.

Thursday 17th October 2013 - A Level grades, and student numbers

I went past a secondary school in Sheffield today and noticed a banner outside proudly proclaiming the proportion of its pupils who got top grades in A level this year.  Such marketing has become very common, usually associated with some statement about the level of improvement from the previous year.  I am wondering how schools are going to cope with what will almost certainly happen to A level results in 2014.

Put simply, they are almost certain to fall.  The key reason for this will be the fact that the school year 2013-14 ushered in the new era in which there will be no in-year resits of A level components.  A number of pupils disappointed to receive B grades used to retake the relevant assessments in the hope of raising their performance to an A.  That is no longer possible.  I have seen some modelling done for OFQUAL, the overseer of school examinations, which suggests that there could be a fall of over 3 percentage points  in the proportion of pupils getting A grades.  That will come on top of the depression of the proportions getting the top-most grades in 2012 and 2103 which has been noticed by the media but not strongly reported.  How will the newspapers - and schools - report results in 2014 when many young people will get poorer final grades than they would have done if they had been in earlier cohorts?

All universities in England now receive an allocation of places with which they can admit students who have not achieved ABB grades in A level - or who have not taken A levels at all.  The best universities receive the smallest allocations, based on their past record of admitting the 'best' students. Yet the proportions of these 'best' students will fall in the future for reason I have just spelled out.  And in addition the cohort of 18 year olds in 2014 will be smaller than that of 2013, and it will continue to fall until nearly the end of the current decade.

What this means for the 'best' universities for 2014 - and presumably beyond - is that they will be fishing in a diminishing pond for the bulk of their student intakes.  Competition for students will rise yet further.  And this increasingly marketised environment the power of the most worthwhile consumers (the 'best' students) will arguably grow as they demand more from universities who want them to be accorded the precious Conditional Firm (CF) status in the applications round.

In 2012 we had the sight of the best universities, in greatest demand from students, leaving places unfilled because they were prohibited from dropping their admissions grades. I fear that the situation in 2014 could see a repeat of those empty places, because there just won't be enough top quality students around to fill the places available.  With the applications season just started it's going to be an interesting year.  

Tuesday 1st October 2013 - The uses (and death) of metaphors

I am interested in words, phrases and expressions. I do the Guardian cryptic crossword on Saturdays (or attempt to) and I have a go at the crossword in the Times Literary Supplement most weeks (although that needs recourse to a Dictionary of Literature for completion, at least in my case).  The English language is a delight to work with, given the words that have come into it from so many different sources - Romance as well as Germanic languages, exotic expressions from other parts of the world and so on. I sometimes get an unusual word on my mind and have to try to avoid using it - I recently had to restrain myself from using the word 'adumbrate' ( meaning to provide an outline or shadow of - in the case I was talking about, the shadow of an argument).

Today it was a matter of metaphors.  I was chairing a meeting of senior colleagues about future strategic plans and priorities.  We were considering how to foster future discussion of the issues that we were starting to formulate our own thinking on.  At the end of the meeting, as part of my summing up, I pointed out that we had played around with three metaphors in our discussion.
1.  A metaphor of gardening.  We were planting the seeds of ideas, others would need to nurture them to bring them to full glory.
2.  A metaphor of childbirth and obstetrics.  We would be the midwives for 'baby projects' that would become independent of us in the fullness of time.
3.  A metaphor of cooking.  We were marinating the ingredients and later others would need to apply the cook's skill to create the final dish.
None of these is particularly original, but they played a useful purpose in our discussions - in part because they can lead into consideration of alternative outcomes.  For example, we might plant the seeds but others may regard the seedlings as weeds and pull them up.  We need to label the young plants with a picture of what they may become to encourage others to pay attention to them and develop them.

That was a discussion amongst colleagues.  One reflection I have on the writing of students today is that they rarely use metaphors.  They never draw parallels between what they are writing or talking about and some other set of entities or situations.  Some metaphors are clichéd (those we used today clearly are in many ways), but others can be very creative and original.  Yet students have not been encouraged to think or write in that way.

Perhaps the explanation lies in schools.  A colleague the other day said his daughter was being taught to identify metaphors in her English class, and her basic view was that they were 'lies'.  If students today view the use of metaphors as something that only occurs in difficult poetry or old prose studied in the classroom that is a great pity.  Our writings of the future will be diminished by this.  The landscape of texts and discussions will be flatter, and will not have the landmarks that draw the eye to particular places or arresting images.

Wednesday 18th September 2013 - The launch of MOOCs

Did those who congregated under the walls of the Bastille Prison in Paris on 14 July 1789 have any inkling of what would result from their actions?  Did those who welcomed Lenin at the Finland Station in St Petersburg in 1917 foresee what might happen next?  Was I today at the start of an educational revolution that will herald a new world for us in higher education?  Frankly, I don't know (just as those in Paris and St Petersburg on fateful dates didn't know).  But I suspect that even if we don't get a revolution out of today's event, we will at least see a world of new possibilities.

The venue was London - to be more precise, the Conference Suite at the British Library.  It was the launch of 'Futurelearn', the UK-based group of universities, led by the Open University, offering MOOCs (Massive Open On-line Courses). Before the formal part of the event I had a long chat with a government adviser about what we were expecting to get out of this new venture.  Frankly, we don't really know.  We don't know who will take our courses, nor in what numbers, nor where they will be.  We don't know how many will go through to the end of them.  We don't know how many will want to get some form of certification for the course.  We don't know how many might want to pursue an interest in the subject further - for example by signing up to a degree programme.  And if they do, we don't know how practicable it will be for them to do so with us (for example through distnace learning programmes) or with someone else.

Martin Bean (VC of the Open Unviersity) and David Willetts both spoke passionately and interestingly, and opened up some new thoughts (at least for me).  I will confine myself to three observations that came from what they said, either directly or indirectly.

1. As Martin pointed out, there was an irony in us meeting in the British Library because via our smartphones and iPads we all had access to more information resources than the whole library that surrounded us.
2. David mentioned the recent launch of a broadband-delivering satellite that will improve mobile coverage for the whole of a continent that is hungry for education but where access is limited.
3. David also posited the example of the learner in another part of the world who takes one of our MOOCs and wants to go deeper and further.  How can we support them if there is no chance of them coming to study within our universities in the UK, and we don't have pure distance learning programmes available?  Is there a case for global alliances of MOOC-delivering universities to direct learners to local providers who themselves then base their programmes on a new internationally-developed pedagogy of materials from across their network?

But I will end with a cautious note.  I do have some doubts about the 'level' and 'depth' of the material on offer.  two familiar clichés seem appropriate.  MOOCs may try to be 'all things to all people', and 'a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.'  I had a brief conversation with Rita Chakrabarti, the BBC Education Correspondent, and she was interested in the first point.  It also came up from another journalist in the press briefing.  A piece of film we were shown in a persentation concerned how plants fix carbon from the atmosphere and combined it with hydrogen and oxygen (in water) to produce carbohydrate.  As was pointed out by a critic, it was an explanation suitable for a 14 year old, but it was far from enough for even an ageing social scientist such as me.  .The blurb for almost all the MOOCs launched today said they requierd no prior knowledge and were suitable for anyone with an interest in the subject (there were a couple of exceptions aimed particularly at children, including Sheffield's offering on dentistry).  My own view is that if we want to support the MOOCs revolution we will need to be more precise in who we are designing our courses for.  And we also need to convince people that the MOOC is only a start for the journey of learning, and that having done a MOOC they don't know it all.

There is a story that when the Chinese leader Zhou Enlai was asked his opinion on what the effects of the French Revolution were he said it was too early to tell.  We shall have to wait to see the longer-term significance of today's events at the British library.

Friday 13th September 2013 - How I got into University despite ....

Several people have obliquely referred to my A level qualifications since they were exposed to the world by Sky News on this year's results day - 15th August.  No one has said it outright, but what they are obviously thinking is 'How did you get into unviersity with those grades?'  For those who don't know, my A level grades were BBC in Geography, History, and 'Economics with British Constitution' (a mixture of Economics and Politics).  Let me explain, and also draw two still-relevant conclusions from my experience.

In my final year at junior school I passed and exam and interview and was offered a place at a 'direct grant' school in West London - Latymer Upper.  Direct grant schools no longer exist, but they included Bradford Grammar, Manchester Grammar, Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Wakefield, Dame Allen's in newcastle and many more.  A few pupils paid to attend but the vast majority were on scholarships paid for by local authorities in the surrounding area.  Such schools drew from more than their own local authority catchment and therefore, I suppose, in a sense 'creamed off' the brightest pupils.  Latymer had five form entry with streaming, and the scholarship boys were in the top four streams and the paid-for boys in the bottom stream.  There was a girls equivalent school - Godolphin and Latymer: more recently I have found out that Dame Susan Greenfield was an exact contemporary of mine there.  Latymer is now an independent school and the social mix of the boys must have changed significantly - my father was, at the time, a printer, and I sat next to a boy whose father was a police constable: another friend had a father who was a signwriter for shops.  I imagine such occupation levels are no longer represented in the school.

There were no league tables of school performance in those days - although there was a bit of competition between direct grant schools as to who could get most pupils into Oxford or Cambridge in any one year.  I wss not a good pupil - coming bottom of the class in several subjects.  But somehow the school singled me out as someone with potential.  They weren't too worried about my current performance, but they believed I could improve in the future.  They put me in a stream that would take O levels (the forerunners of GCSE) after only 4 secondary years insetad of the normal 5.  This also meant that I did only a small number of subjects - nothing like the 10 or 11 that are commonplace now.  Because my birthday is late in the acacdemic year I was not yet 15 when I took my O levels.  Although I didn't do very well (I got only one top grade, and faield one subject which I later retook successfully) the school persevered with me and I entered the sixth form.

So I was still only 16 (nearing 17) when I took my A levels, with the results I have already confessed to.  I was too young to go to university (indeed I hadn't applied in that A level year for that reason) and stayed on into the 'Third year Sixth' to take the Oxford entrance exam and interview.  That was what the school had seen as the outcome for me all along.  So, six months after getting my not-very-good A levels, I was called to Oxford for interview.  I don't think I had made a great leap of performance in those six months, but I was offered a place.  I suspect the college I had applied to had in some ways applied the same test on my application as my school - looking for potential rather than achievement to date.  (Just to show that at some point I must have made some progress I will add that I did graduate with a First at the end of my three years as an undergraduet, in a year when there were only 4 Firsts awarded to around 75 students in my disciplinary cohort.  I add that not to boast but to suggest that this faith in my potential had perhaps been justified.)

What two conclusions do I draw from this? 

Without two aspects of this story my life would almost certainly have been very different.
1. If there had been league tables of school performance at O level and at A level my school would probably have needed to focus on improving aggregate performance there and would not have fast-tracked me and other pupils through O level with the recognition that we might not do very well.  We would have been put into a more 'standard' progression route.  And that would have led me to take A levels at the 'normal' age instead of a year early, and probably go to a university other than Oxford at that point (assuming I had achieved the grades to be accepted at all!).
2. Both the school and Oxford were more interested in identifying potential - and backing their judgement on this - than in rewarding past performance.  I am sure there must have been other applicants who had better A level grades than me, but I was thought to be the better long-term bet.  The rhetoric around A level results and university entry today is entirely geared to a university place being a reward for top A level performance.  If that had been the case in my day I may not have gone to university at all.  Past performance can be measured; future potential can't.  But I certainly benefited from the attempt to do the latter.  Today universities still attempt to identify the potential in candidates, but woe betide the university that then offers places to candidates with lower grades (but potential) than to others with higher grades who are rejected because they are felt to have reached their peak and show little promise for further development.  

Thursday 15th August 2013 - A Level results day and the media swarm

A few years ago I examined a PhD thesis, in another university, on Rome's Bangladeshi immigrant community.  The women were almost all domestic servants.  But it was the men who interested me more.  They were predominantly street traders.  But they exhibited a herd instinct whereby instead of each one developing their own line in goods, they all migrated between activities en masse.  The latest wheeze was that someone had discovered that there was a good trade in writing people's names on a grain of rice.  So almost all the Bangladeshi male traders had ditched their previous lines of business and moved into rice-writing, often within sight of each other along the main tourist streets.  And the result?  The market for rice-writing became saturated, the distinctiveness of the product disappeared, and the trade collapsed.

I was reminded of that thesis today with the media coverage of the opening of the clearing and adjustment season following the publication of A level results.  Instead of Bangladeshi street traders in Rome the 'competing' and yet ultimately replicating interests were the television channels.  Anyone who watched the national BBC bulletins today will have seen a focus on Birmingham schools, with some soundbites from David Eastwood, the Vice-Chancellor.of Birmingham University.

But anyone watching any other channel would have seen Sheffield featured.  Of the 100 or so universities in England, and the dozen or more in Yorkshire, ITV, Sky News, ITV Calendar, and BBC Look North had all chosen to focus on us as the exemplar.  Anyone switching between news channels would have seen almost identicial shots of our clearing hotline room.

And they would also have found almost identical interviews with me.  Perhaps I should have brought in a change of clothes so that I could have been wearing something different for each interview.  In total I did 7 televsion interviews, two of them live broadcasts and the other 5 as parts of 'packages' for later editing and transmission.  But rather like the Bangladeshi street traders, the television crews were almost tripping over each other, with at one point three organisations in the room at the same time, complete with their  camera tripods, fluffy boom microphones (Sky were different and went for a lapel microphone), and cables. 

So what was the story line today?  For all but one interview it was about the way in which universities like Sheffield are now in clearing looking for high quality candidates, and I had to explain in each case that the limits on our recruitment of certain students (those with ABB grades or above) have been removed so that we can now facilitate students 'trading up' to a better unviersity than they had been committed to if their A level grades were higher than predicted.  So, again like the Bangladeshi traders in Rome, the 'product' from the media teams became relatively homogenous.  But one of the local channels took the line that more people from the north want to stay at home in the north and that university catchments are becoming more localised.  Unfortunately for the interviewer, that argument isn't true for Sheffield.  We haven't yet analysed the home locations of the students who will arrive next month, but over the last 4 years the proportion of our students from the Yorkshire and the Humber region has fallen a little, with the proportions from London and the South-East rising.  But I thought it was probably too much to go into that detail on air so stayed with explaining why northern cities are such good places to be a student.

Thursday 8th August 2013 - The National Student Survey and its impact

I have spent today juggling two major issues at either end of the 'student journey' - the preparations for the declaration of A level results next week and the consequent activity leading to the admission of a cohort of new students in 6 weeks time, and the National Student Survey results for students who have just graduated.  It is a belief of the present coalition government, and particularly of the Higher Education Minister, David Willetts, that there is a connection between these two.  It is argued that candidates for admission to university need as wide a range of information as possible about the possible choices open to them, and that key within this is the material that comes from the National Student Surevy - in other words, the opinions of students who have taken the courses they are considering.

I'm not so sure.  If that idea is true, then courses for which the National Student Survey (NSS) results show a low level of satisfaction should see a reduced rate of applications, and vice versa.  A few years ago I undertook some research to ascertain whether this was indeed so.  I found that there was a positive relationship between NSS score and applications levels, but it was very weak and not statistically significant.  From the perspective of a Pro-Vice-Chancellor this is a little unfortunate: had the relationship been demonstrably strong that would have given me ammunition for pointing out to departments that the long-term outcome of poor performance in terms of satisfaction could be a drying up of applications.  Do candidates really look in detail at satisfaction scores for the possible courses they are consdiering, and if so does such information play a major role in their decisions on which course to apply to?  A few months ago I took part in a round table discussion at the Guardian newspaper where we came to the conclusion that candidates are perhaps bamboozled with too much information, and that as immature consumers they are anyway more likely to rely on personal recommendation and anecdote than on surveys.

But I am clear that the national student survey does have a significant infleunce on the admissions position - although perhaps indirectly.  And that influence is not nuanced for different departments.  The influence coems via the way that NSS data are incorporated in the major university league tables published by newspapers such as the Times, the Guardian and other media.  And those league tables take the aggregate data for whole institutions rather than the figures for individual departments and courses.  Evidence from market research suggests that league tables are being increasingly used by candidates in choosing where to apply to.

And that actually does give me a lever to use with any poor-performing departments in the NSS.  Instead of saying to them 'your scores are such that people won;t apply to you', what I can in effect now say to them is that their scores are such as to drag down the aggregate figures for the university as a whole, and thus affect the institution's league table position adversely.  I suppose that sounds rather like the approach of the head teacher in the boarding school novels of the past - "Your poor behaviour is letting yourself down, but more importantly it's letting the SCHOOL down." 

Sheffield continues to do very well indeed in produing high levels of satisfaction among our students.  This year's data will be publicised next week when the embargo on doing so nationally is lifted.  Not coincidentally, that is the same week as the publication of A level results.  But I have already taken action over a very small number of under-performing departments to get the message to them that they are letting the University down.

Thursday 18th July 2013 - Dressing the graduating body

So far this week I have attended 9 degree ceremonies, with two more lined up for tomorrow.  I have seen students from all faculties cross the stage.   I have presided at two ceremonies and read the names out at one more.  I go to all the ceremonies where there is a Senate Award winner, and also any others where I nominated or supported the honorary graduate.  In total this week I will have attended 11 ceremonies - but when I started as a Pro-Vice-Chancellor there was the expectation that the PVCs would attend all 15.

Sitting on the front row of ceremonies, even more so than sitting in the main seat, one cannot help but notice the deportment, the clothing and the general attitude of the graduates as they come across the stage.  What follow are some observations that I hope people will take light-heartedly.  A few of them are in the form of hypotheses that someone in the future could test.

1. The proportion of men wearing university ties of some sort (the sports tie, a faculty tie, the University's own tie) varies hugely between faculties.  I think it has been highest in the Faculty of Enngineering, and lowest in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.
2. There is a strong vogue this year for very thin ties.  Perhaps this is something that is more general out there in the wider world, although I haven't noticed it.
3. A hypothesis: Male students of German nationality are more likely to wear a bow tie than are students of other nnationalities.
4. We have had two kilts at ceremonies I have been at, but no lederhosen,  I remember a couple of years ago when the shortness of a pair of lederhosen outdid the shortness of even the tiniest mini-skirts (which - reformulate as a hypothesis - tend to be worn by some Chinese students).
5. Chinese males display a bimodal sartorial choice - either they wear brand new and very smart suits, or they wear a jumper or tee-shirt with jeans and trainers.

The main issue with women seems to be shoes. 
1. The shorter a woman, the more likely she is to be wearing flat shoes or slippers.  There's actually a possible overall hypothesis here, because there seems to me to be a relationship between personal height and shoe height.  In other words, taller women tend to wear taller heels.(and for the statistically minded I recognise that the correlation coefficient would probably only be about +0.4, although statistically significant across a large sample).
2. Related to this is the hypothesis that the taller the heel the slower the rate of progress across the stage.  And from the facial experssions of some women I suspect that at a certain point they regret not having chosen to wear something lower - particularly in the light of the steps they have to climb to get on the stage, and more particularly those they have to descend.
3. This next observation would require longitudinal study - and I don't have hard data from previous years, only impressions.  But it seems to me that the curtsey is rapidly dying out.  This year my observation is that it has been confined to a very small nnumber of women in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, and to women from African or Afro-Caribbean origins.  There were more curtseys only a year or two ago.
4, The variety of clothing on sale is astonishing.  Menn's suits generally come in a limited variety of styles and fabrics.  But the dresses and other outfits worn by the women are almost infinitely varied.  There is one electric blue lace dress that has been worn across the stage three times to my knowledge (possibly three friends sharing the same dress).  And one orange/pink lace dress was worn twice in the same ceremony - by two consecutive women.  Perhaps they had arranged that between themselves, but I guess if they hadn't they were both mortified.
5. There have been fewer women wearing trousers this year than I remember befroe - but perhaps that is a function of the hot weather rather than any fashion trend among graduates. 

Finally, the two ceremonies I presided at have left me with a question about human anatomy after shaking hands with several hundred new graduates.  How is that the moisture level and temperature of hands varies so much among people who have been sitting next to each other in the same conditions?  It doesn't seem to relate to gender, or degree school.  Are there any general explanations?

Friday 12th July 2013 - Do email scammers need training?

Just so that people aren't wondering whether I've given up the blog, I should explain that I've just been away for 11 days holiday, and have therefore not been recording my thoughts recently.

Perhaps it's because I work in education that I want to make everything better - even when it's perhaps best left as it is.  I sometimes think we should run courses for e-mail scammers so that they can do a better job.  But then I know that even with the oddities they currently send out they often catch unwary souls who should know better. And it's the errors in what they write that often give the game away.

I've been set to thinking about this by an e-mail I received this morning. It purported to come from a senior colleague elsewhere in higher education, and was a plea for financial help because, so the story went, he was in a foreign country and all his possessions had been stolen - and the hotel manager wouldn't let him go until he had settled his hotel bill.  Even if this had been a plausible story it was immediately obvious that the mail did not come from my colleague (despite hackers having used his address).  For a start there was the reference to 'my cell'.  What older Englishman uses that vocabulary to refer to his mobile phone?  Then there were the lower case renderings of what should have been 'I'.  And then there were mis-spellings.  All of these pointed to a scammer who hadn't got a clue about the style of the person s/he was trying to impersonate.  Why hadn't they tried a little harder?

And then we all get those emails from banks and other financial institutions telling us that we need to provide some extra information because of a systems breakdown.  But the name of the bank contains spelling errors, it is given as 'Inc' instead of 'plc', the grammar is hopeless, and the syntax tells us instantly that this is a message that has not been passed by a corporate communications team. 

So perhaps although I want to root out incompetence anywhere and everywhere, in the area of internet and e-mail scamming a measure of incompetence is useful to us all.

Thursday 13th June 2013 - Enabling student discussions

I suspect I am not alone, as a lecturer, in reflecting that some of the  most satisfying experiences in a class are when I am there saying nothing and not even interacting with the students.  They have been divided into groups, set a task, and they are on their own.   Almost instantly there is a hubbub of voices.  After a pause of a couple of minutes the lecturer starts to walk round, eavesdropping on each of the groups.  .That's where the joy comes - in hearing that there is a profound level of debate going on around the topic set, with theoretical positions being examined, empirical material brought in from prior reading, and a pragmatic approach being adopted to finding a consensus on a viewpoint that can be presented to the whole group later on.

Make no mistake - I do enjoy lecturing.  I get great pleasure in seeing that I have captured an audience and in watching their expressions as they follow an argument, or perhaps come to consider a long-held opinion in a new way.  And occasionally there are those pin-drop moments when you know they are all waiting to see where you will take them next.  But there is equal joy in having set up a task for a group and watching and listening as they set to it with enthusiasm.  Of course, for this to happen there have to be interested and engaged individuals involved. But there also have to be a series of questions posed that seem to the participants to be of great relevannce, importance and interest.  Both of those conditions need to be fulfilled.  I have sat through too many sessions at training events or national consultations and conferences where the enthusiasm of the participants has been dashed when they are given questions to debate which show that the organisers are simply out of touch with most of those present.  What follows the command to 'Get on with discussion in your groups' is then silence broken eventually by someone saying 'What are we going to make of this, then?'

Today we had a significant meeting of departmental directors of learning and teaching, along with team leaders in various professional services, to consider some of the big picture issues facing the university over the next few years as well as some of the more immediate matters that we need to deal with over the next year.  We had two sets of group discussions, and the enthusiasm generated within these was immense.  The questions had been alighted upon after consultation with a number of key individuals, but were unknown in advance to the majority of those present.  Some issues posed were controversial, and the tasks set were unusual.  But the outcomes were useful and thought-provoking beyond the dreams of the organisers. The material generated was infintely greater than could have been arrived at by virtually any other format.

Over the next few months we will be working on many of the ideas generated, but I will mention one here.  There was agreement for all faculties that currently our graduates lack sufficient understanding of the wider context within which their knowledge is set. It is perhaps a familiar issue in English education, with its over-emphasis on specialisation.  So there's a challenge for us in the coming months: strengthening the inter-disciplinarity of our students so that they can see how their bit of detailed knowledge fits into a wider picture.

Monday 10th June 2013 - A vision of future exams

In the departmental office the exams secretary is almost hidden behind piles of marked exam papers.  Over the last three weeks the sight of people carrying bundles of scripts has been commonplace on campus - I've even seen a particularly big load being carried in a shopping trolley. 

I carry a lot of materials around with me, including the 'papers' for meetings, presentations to be given at conferences and other events, the university's business recovery plan for teaching (which I have with me at all times), and various reports.  But none of these is in paper form. They are all files on my iPad or stored on the memory stick I carry in my jacket pocket (suitably backed up to my desktop, of course!).  Meetings papers are kept in an app caleld 'Notability' which even allows me to annotate them on screen and to save the annotations.  All the materials I write are written direct to the screen, not on paper.

Students generally work like that too.  They word process all their essays and assignments.  Some take notes in class on a mobile device or a notebook computer.  Some record the few lectures I give in my option class as audio files.  And yet at the end of the year we expect them to pick up a pen and produce their thoughts via handwriting in an exam lasting 2 or even 3 hours.

When I was an undergraduate it was, of course, very different.  Throughout my second and third years I was expected to produce three full essays every two weeks, handwritten on quarto paper.  I guess they were each about 3500 words long.  They were either read out and commented on in the tutorial, or read by the tutor and handed back at the next class.  No marks from these were ever carried forward into my degree classification which depended entirely on 10 x 3 hour exams plus a dissertation.  We thought little of the mechannics of those exams (although the content bothered us).  We were used to writing with pen and ink on paper.

Isn't it time that we moved on?  Why should students who never do an extended piece of handwriting during the year be expected to do so under exam conditions?  They will probably never do so again in their future careers. Can't we bring exams up to date?  (I will leave on one side the defence of written essay-style exams: I do believe they are a good test of the ability to structure an argument under pressure.)

How about the following as a vision?
When students enter the exam room they sit at a tablet computer.  It has wifi disabled so students are not able to Google material.  They type their answers and at the end of the exam they save their work and leave the room.  Their answers are then retained in a central file on a shared drive to which all the relevant markers have access.  Markers call up essays on screen, read them, and append a file containing feedback and comments.  Second markers or moderators can similarly work from the file version.  Marks can be recorded electronically, particularly if some widget is created to link the essay file to a spreadsheet.  External examiners can have their sample sent to them electronically.  And once the exam board is over students can have their essay, with appended comments, sent back to them electronically. (Befroe anyone points out that some students can tyope faster than others I would point out that some students write faster than others too.)

Apart from bringing exams into the 21st century and aligning them with the ways in which students record information in everyday life, think of the green impact of such a proposal - the tons of paper saved, and the storage cupboards for old exam papers that could be turned to more efficient uses.  How about it?

Friday 24th May 2013 - What are people doing on their iPads?

At one time if people were getting a little bored in a conference presentation they doodled on their note pads, whispered to their companions, or rifled through their papers for something more interesting to keep them occupied. I will confess that in some boring lectures when I was a student I wrote my weekly letter home.

My first encounter with mobile technology in a lecture or conference setting came in the very early days of mobile phones, when they were the size of a house brick.  It was at an 'international' conference in Italy ('international' although I was the only foreigner present).  As the afternoon turned into the early evening (many of the papers were too long, but the chairman held no one back to their allotted time) a man on the other side of the auditorium from me decided to make a call to his wife to explain that he would be late home.  That simple message led to a domestic dispute, which we could appropriately (since it is an Italian term) describe as molto crescendo during which the conference speaker gave up his address from the rostrum so we could all participate in the more engaging drama of the phone call - the audience member involved being completely oblivious to the fact that he had his own personal audience of 50 or so.

Mobile technology in lecture rooms, conference presentations or in training sessions is now ubiquitous.  And perhaps we have all learned how to use it more discreetly.  But when I am giving a presentation, as I was today, and everyone is busy with their iPads, I am never sure what is happening.  The room is quiet - probably quieter than in the days of the whispered conversations.  But what are colleagues actually doing on their iPads?  Are they taking down notes? Are they switching the microphone on to record some of the gems of the presentation?  Are they checking their e-mails?  Are they writing messages to others?  Are they checking ther diaries for their next engagement?  The speaker can't tell.  At least I've never yet had anyone plug in their earphones when I have started speaking, but that could yet happen. Will I be up against their favourite YouTube clip, or will the soundtrack from their favourite music accompany what I am saying?  Conference audiences today may outwardly appear to be more attentive than they were years ago, but the possible distractions are actually much greater.  That attentiveness may be deceptive.   

Monday 13th May 2013 - Normative gender and images on the walls of rooms

The Higher Education Funding Council for Engalnd (HEFCE) has moved out of its former London offices in the Centreproint Building into an office block near Chancery Lane. I was there today to take part in the appraisal for a research contract HEFCE wishes to place with a consultant.  The offices are bright and airy, with lots of glass partitions giving a feeling of transparency.  There are a lot of decals on the glass, in modern designs. And one wall is decorated with an enlarged photograph of two young students, a male and a female.

Images and decoration make a big difference to work environments.  They help to create the mood of the space, and also say something about the unspoken assumptions of expected behaviour.

On Friday I was on the interview panel for the appointmennt of a chief executive position within higher education. The interveiws took place in a fine modern room in the Enegineering faculty of another university.  The walls of the room were decorated with stunning photographs in which I counted 11 males and only 1 female - and she was apparently a technician being instructed by one of the males.  In one of the breaks between interviews I explored other parts of the building to see how the gender balance of images worked there.  All the pictures (some as oil paintings, others as posters, some as photographs of key staff) were of men.  Finally I spotted a female image on a small poster on a noticeboard - and when I got close I saw it was a picture of a woman with her head in her hands and a message about getting advice from the Counselling Service.  I sympathised with her - in such an apparently male dominated faculty I was not surprised that she might be feeling low.  I am pleased that here in Sheffield Mike Hounslow, with the help of Elena Rodriguez-Falcon and colleagues, is keenly aware of issues around encouraging women in and into Engineering.

But that evening I was sitting next to the newly-elected Student Union Womens' Officer at the annual Union Academic Awards.  The event was taking place in Firth Hall.  I mentioned my experiences that day at the other university and concluded with remarks about our attitude in Engineering here in Sheffield.  But, rightly, she then pointed out that the portraits of former Vice-Chancellors on the walls around us were all of men.

Thursday 25th April 2013 - Student employability and making use of alumni

When I first met my final year option class this session, back in late September, I asked them if any of them had a job or postgraduate course already lined up.  Only one of them had.  She turned out to be the one student who had secured a work placemennt for herself the previous year and was now on the degree 'with employment experience'.  

There is a steady stream of news stories from other unviersities about the proportion of their programmes that incude a work placement, or the proportion of their students who gain such experience (the two are not the same thing).  Earlier this week I had lunch with the Vice-President of a major industrial company who said that a high proportion of their graduate positions go to those who have already undertaken work placements with them. 

Today we saw the results of the annual Times Higher Education Student Experience Survey.  I am delighted that Sheffield is in third place (although a little disappointed that we are not top, of course).  We follow East Anglia and Oxford in the overall rankings.  We are top for the Students Union and also in the top five on a wide variety of indicators - including the quality of our teaching, the support services, and the library, to name just a few.  But one measure where we fall short is in students' perceptions of our connections with 'industry', which I take to mean the connections with employment and the wider world of potential work opportunities.  This doesn't necessarily mean work opportunities - it can also mean the connections established through those who use our graduates' skills appearing in courses and interacting with students.

Of course, there are many programmes where there is an intimate connection with employment - Medicine, for example.  But there is a wider message here for Sheffield.  We owe it to our stduents to enhance the ways in which their time studying with us is influenced by considerations relating to potential careers beyond graduation.  There are many ways we could do that, and in some departments we are already doing it well. But we could do more.

Last week I received the regular alumni magazine from the unviersity at which I studied.  There was the usual leaflet asking me to update my personal details.  But one of the key questions there was asking whether I could offer a work placement to any current student.  On another line of thought, I wonder how many departments get recent graduates back 4-5 years after graduation and ask their opinions on curriculum change and the course offer to create programmes that help students to develop the confidence and skills to be successful in employment.

I am setting up a significant project over the next few months to seek to redress that relatively low score on industry connections in the THE survey, and to increase the placement opportunities for our students.

But before anyone comments that I seem to be taking a very instrumentalist view of what higher education is about, let me say that I also want to increase the intellectual breadth of our programme offer to expand stduents' minds. Perhaps I'll blog about that sometime in the near future.

Sunday 21st April 2013 - The International Languages Festival

I don't normally write a blog on a Sunday.  But then I don't usually spend part of my Sundays attending classes in the Hicks Building.  This weekend has been the International Language Festival, organised by the Students' Union, so exceptions have been made. Over the two days around 150 1 hour taster sessions of different languages from around the world have been offered.  The organisers told me when I left for a late lnch today that by the end of the weekend they estimated that 'several hundred' people would have participated in the sessions.

Each session was 50 minutes long and organised with some common themes - where the language is spoken and by how many, something about its origins, the alphabet it uses, the sounds it has, and a 'get by' introduction to some set phrases.  After the sessions I attended I can now say (among other things) 'Good Evening' and 'Thank you' in Romanian, and 'My name is Paul' in Magyar (Hungarian).  There were 10 at the Romanian class I attended and 7 in the Magyar class - even on a Sunday morning - and these were competing against Japanese, Dutch, Greek, Farsi, Urdu, Begali, Korean, Braille and a host of others being offered at the same time.

When Sheffield's International Language Festival was launched two years ago I believe it was the only one in the country.  It is a fantastic opportunity to learn a little bit about communication in a different part of the world.  I thoroughly enjoyed my morning there today.  And the students who put on the classes about their own languages were well prepared and motivational - despite the fact that most are in Sheffield to study subjects ranging from Medicine to Engineering and in most cases they have never taught their language before.

But from my observation of the others present there was one under-represented group among those taking part - students from the UK.  There were people from the Sheffield region, international students, overseas undergraduates and postgraduates, but although there were some UK students attending they were in the minority.  (I will be delighted if later analysis on the part of the organisers shows that I was wrong.)  I think we all continue to struggle with the fact that many UK students do not seem interested in reaping the benefits of being in an international university, and of widening their cultural competence to face new situations in other countries or with people who are not like themselves. 

Wednesday 17th April 2013 - How to get you job application rejected

I am involved in a considerable number of appointment committees for a wide variety of jobs.  This afternoon, with others, I have been shortlisting candidates for a new appointment.  As so often in the current economic climate, the advertisement attracted a much larger number of applicants than one would ideally like.  People sometimes say to me that they are delighted with the huge number of applicants for jobs they have advertised. Ideally I would prefer about four applicants for any post I am involved with - but with each of them outstandingly able to do the job.

The truth is that for any advertised post it seems to me that a significant proportion of applications can be almost instantly discarded. Two things really stand out.  Firstly it is amazing how many applicants do not proof-read what they have written - or perhaps if they have proof read it then they are leaving an indication that they can't spell and / or don't know the rules of grammar. I am not saying that those attributes are universally important - there are many jobs where that will not be the case - but for the jobs I am involved in the ability to communicate clearly and accurately in writing is usually crucial.

But the second fault with many applications is perhaps more severe - a failure to acknowledge the job specification in constructing an application letter.  If 10 aspects of the job requirements are identified then a good candidate will show how s/he fits each of those ten.  The poor candidate instead produces an unstructured account of themselves with no reference to the post in question.  The poorest candidate will include clear markers that the letter they are submitting is a scissors-and-paste exercise from a previous unsuccessful application - for example (as in one case today) indicating a task they will be performing in the future, except the date given was over a year ago.

As regular readers of my blog will know, an exercise I get my students to do is to mark each other's essay drafts against the set marking criteria.  They all say they learn a lot from doing so.  Some say it's the first time they've really considered the criteria and how they can be used to help structure their work.

Several of the applicants we considered today could, I am sure, benefit greatly from being issued with two or three applications from other candidates and being asked to score them against the job specification for the post.  That way they might recognise how to rewrite their own applications so that they provide a more convincing argument for shortlisting. 

Wednesday 27th March 2013 - PhDs by publication

I have lost count of how many PhD examinations I have been involved in - either as an internal or an external examiner.  In the latter capacity I have undertaken vivas with only the other examiner and the candidate present, or with a room full of supporters and friends: I have been involved in examinations in three different countries, and in two different languages; some theses have been passed outright, others have been referred, sometimes with a lot of work yet to be done.  I have examined theses based on a wide variety of methodologies (or in some cases apparently none).

Today I have examined a PhD in what to me have been unique circumstances.  Today's PhD viva was of a candidate presenting for a PhD by publication.  I have been involved in examining such theses before - it is the standard Scandinavian model and candidates normally submit around four papers plus a commentary. In most cases the four papers submitted are the only ones the generally young researcher has published to date.

Today's examination was of a 'student' whose publication list runs to nearly 300 items - certainly twice the number in my own cv.  Fifteen of these had been selected to constitute the thesis.  Around half were single authored items - mostly in very high quality journals.  The others were collaborations but the role of the candidate was made very clear in the supporting documentation.

There was little doubt that a PhD would be awarded by my fellow examiner and me.  But we got into an interesting three-way discussion with the candidate.  The individual concerned had completed an MPhil within two years of the award of a relevant first degree but had not then gone on to undertake a PhD.  Instead a series of posts in research units had come up and now, perhaps 25 years later, our candidate was well into a career as a full-time researcher. Of those 300 publications, a considerable number were actually 'grey literature' in the form of reports to commissioning bodies.  We had the chance to read some of these in the thesis, and the pity was that the findings and arguments within them had not been made more widely available.  But, as the candidate explained, the relentless need to keep a research unit going by constantly finding new funded projects to undertake meant that on completion of a particular piece of funded consultancy research there was always a need to move straight on to the next client.  There is no time to step back and produce the more reflective piece that might set the particular research task in a wider context and then make the results available to a far wider audience.

Many young academics come into a university career through an enjoyment of discovery and of research.  Yet a career built entirely in a research institute with little or no baseline funding and the constant need to chase the next contract does not seem to me to be the way to complete happiness as an academic - certainly not for me.  And I think our candidate today agreed: when asked what the ideal way of spending the next twelve months would be the answer was to have that period to take some time to reflect on all the work and studies completed over the past few years, and to tie those projects and findings together into something more substantial.

Even without that bigger period of reflection, it was still a very impresive body of work that we awarded a PhD to today.

Saturday 23rd March 2013 - A Russell Group delegation, and EU officials: guess which had the better gender balance?

Those reading my blog regularly from within the University of Sheffield will know that the student newspaper, Forge Press, took exception to one paragraph of what I wrote on 26 February.   The theme of that blog was my desire to see women take senior roles as equals to men - such as the Presidency of the Students' Union.  The paper misunderstood what I was trying to get at and decided I was attacking the Women's Officer post.  That was far from my intention.

I am going to risk talking about gender again today.  Early this morning I got home from a day of meetings in Brussels.  I should have been back last night but with both the Snake and the Woodhead Passes closed by snow, the road journey via the M62 and M1 took three and a quarter hours so I didn't get home until a quarter to one (quarter to two Brussels time). 

I was in Brussels as part of a Russell Group delegation holding discussions with various European Union officials and others. The topics of discussion included the EU's future research budget, Erasmus exchange schemes, the EU's proposed financial support for Masters students studying outside their country of residence, the EU's attitude to on-line learning possibilities, and research capacity building in the countries that joined the Union most recently. 

There were only four women in our delegation of over 20 from the UK.  We had four meetings with high level officials, as well as round table discussions with representatives of research bodies from some of the A8 and the A2 (the accession 8 and the accession 2 - the new EU members).  Our meetings were with:
- The Deputy Director-General for Education and Culture, who hailed from Catalonia but who had studied in there other European countries and who was able to engage in sharp discussion with us on areas of disagreement as well as agreement. 
- The Deputy UK Permanent representative to the EU, amongst whose previous posts had been the role of ambassador to Argentina.  Here we met a civil servant and diplomat at the very height of all the powers of synthesis, clear presentation and political understanding that such individuals, at their very best, can command.
- The Chief Scientific Advisor to the EU, who reports direct to President Baroso and who has the authority - and clearly the understanding of scientific communication - to intervene in any EU policy debate where a scientific viewpoint would be of relevance.
- The EU Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science.  This was the outstanding meeting of our visit - with an individual who was completely on top of the brief, prepared to be frank and open and to answer all the points we made, and who we left with the whole of our delegation commenting that the future of EU research policy couldn't be in better hands.

Only the Deputy Director-General for Education and Culture was a man: the others were all women.  I hope I was not the only one of our delegation to reflect, at the end of the day, on our own gender balance and compare it to that of the very powerful EU officials (and the delegations from the A8 and A2) that we had met. The more women who get elected or appointed to the most senior positions, the more role models there then are for others to follow.

Monday 4th March 2013 - Lobbying in parliament for international students

It's not often that, at the end of a presentation, everyone in the room turns to their neighbours and says "that was fantastic" or words like it.  It's not often that people say "I'm going to quote from that".  It's especially not often that the people saying this are MPs, Peers, representatives of the university mission groups, the President of the National Union of Students, advisers from government departments, journalists, and lobbyists.  But that's what happende this evening.

We were at Parliament to present a report the Unviersity commissioned on the economic impact of international students on the city of Sheffield - a report that covered all international students, whether studying at our university, at Sheffield Hallam, or at Sheffield College.  The speeches were short, effective and to the point.  The event was jointly hosted by Paul Blomfield - our local MP - and Nadhim Zahawi - Conservative MP for Stratford-upon-Avon.  Both are members of the BIS Select Committee and both are working tirelessly to try to persuade the government to take international students out of the calculation of net migration.  Other short speeches were made by our Vice-Chacellor, Sir Keith Burnett, and by Nicola Dandridge, the Chief Executive of Universities UK who thanked the Unviersity for commissioning what is to date a unique study of the local impact of international students.

Incidentally, had he been still alive, it sems quite possible to me that Enoch Powell - famous for his anti-immigration stance - would have been on the side of Paul and Nadhim (and many, many others) wanting to remove students from the immigration count.  In Powell's notorious 'Rivers of Blood' speech of April 1968 he specifically said: "This has nothing to do with the entry of Commonwealth citizens, any more than of aliens, into this country for the purposes of study or improving their qualifications. ... They are not, and never have been, immigrants."

What was it that moved the audience so much this evening?  It was a short film made by our Students Union on the message that in today's world studying at a global university has made us all, from whatever origin, in one way or another international students.  And that those who will succeed in the future are those who have made the most of the international opportunities they are offered. I commend it to everyone reading this blog.  It can be found at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsX_yg6ovoI&feature=player_embedded#!