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.