thought.photos

occasional snapshots of thought

Posts from the “Teaching Practice” Category

Fellwalking etiquette

Posted on 8th August 2023

I have heard it said many times recently that people have forgotten how to behave. One theory is that the relative lack of social interaction during the pandemic has caused some to forget their social skills. Personally, I think there’s more to it than that. Sure, that may be a contributory factor, but I’m more inclined to believe that the pandemic simply exacerbated an already existing decline in social etiquette. Of course, I’m completely aware that I’m growing older and tend to have less tolerance for poor behaviour. Possibly I’m simply experiencing an age-old generational trend of older people believing that younger people don’t know how to behave. Except that it’s not just young people, it’s people in general whose behaviour seems to have…

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Meadowsweet and Summer Weather

Posted on 18th August 2017

The summer break can’t come soon enough as each successive year in higher education becomes more pressured. Long gone are the days when some academics would disappear at the end of teaching and not return until the start on the new autumn term. For many of us, that’s a good thing but like all pendulums, this one has now swung too far in the other direction. It’s very difficult now to find the dedicated time we once had for curriculum development and the creation of new teaching/learning materials. Just at a time when our institutions are being judged on their teaching excellence and we are being challenged to be even more excellent teachers, our opportunities to make this actually happen are being reduced. But…

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Introducing the Web as a content platform

Posted on 24th May 2015

Last Friday was Web Teaching Day, hosted at the University of Greenwich. The event is organised so that those who teach Web Design (or variations of that discipline) can get together and discuss their approach to teaching/learning. During the morning session we heard from a number of great speakers who described how they introduce their undergraduate students to HTML and CSS and there were some interesting ideas. Inspired by what I’d heard, I prefixed my talk at the start of the afternoon session (on staff/student communication) with a short explanation of an approach to teaching HTML that I have developed this year. The session was unscheduled and I didn’t have time to go into detail, so this article is an attempt to expand on…

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