Cross‐campus Collaboration: A Scientometric and Network Case Study of Publication Activity Across Two Campuses of a Single Institution

Team science and collaboration have become crucial to addressing key research questions confronting society. Institutions that are spread across multiple geographic locations face additional challenges. To better understand the nature of cross‐campus collaboration within a single institution and the effects of institutional efforts to spark collaboration, we conducted a case study of collaboration at Cornell University using scientometric and network analyses. Results suggest that cross‐campus collaboration is increasingly common, but is accounted for primarily by a relatively small number of departments and individual researchers. Specific researchers involved in many collaborative projects are identified, and their unique characteristics are described. Institutional efforts, such as seed grants and topical retreats, have some effect for researchers who are central in the collaboration network, but were less clearly effective for others

Scenario pedagogy as a negotiated, multimodal approach to developing professional communication practices in higher education

Includes bibliographical references.The focus of this study is pedagogy - the 'how' of teaching. In particular, a negotiated and multimodal pedagogical approach which I have coined scenario pedagogy is of interest. Scenario pedagogy involves embedding an entire curriculum into a topical and authentic scenario, relevant to a particular group of students in higher education. The course in question is professional communication and the target group comprises senior and post-graduate accounting and other finance and information systems students registered in the commerce faculty. They are not communication students per se but register for a one-semester professional communication course towards their respective commerce degrees. In this study I examine how these students develop their professional communication practices using a wide variety of verbal and visual semiotic resources. Their selection of hybrid discursive, generic and modal resources are foregrounded at both draft and final product stage and include their communicative processes as well as the material artefacts they deliver in class. How students instantiate their meaning making and emerging identity as professionals-to-be is highlighted against a pedagogical framework of negotiated design. This framework combines a multiliteracies cum multimodal perspective which is underpinned by the notion of transformed practice. As pivotal elements of transformation - personally, collectively and societally - education and communication play significant roles, particularly in post-Apartheid South Africa still characterised by enormous socio-economic disparities and disadvantage

Students learning science: Representation construction in a digital environment

This thesis showed the viable digital delivery for a representation-focused approach for teaching science. This study has led to guidelines for a generative digital design and sequencing of representational tasks and resources. It has also illustrated students’ collaborative reasoning processes during a problem-solving task, reflective of an authentic scientific inquiry

Teacher Education Futures: Developing learning and teaching in ITE across the UK

A selection of papers from the Teacher Education Futures conference 2006

Models for Learning (Mod4L) Final Report: Representing Learning Designs

The Mod4L Models of Practice project is part of the JISC-funded Design for Learning Programme. It ran from 1 May – 31 December 2006. The philosophy underlying the project was that a general split is evident in the e-learning community between development of e-learning tools, services and standards, and research into how teachers can use these most effectively, and is impeding uptake of new tools and methods by teachers. To help overcome this barrier and bridge the gap, a need is felt for practitioner-focused resources which describe a range of learning designs and offer guidance on how these may be chosen and applied, how they can support effective practice in design for learning, and how they can support the development of effective tools, standards and systems with a learning design capability (see, for example, Griffiths and Blat 2005, JISC 2006). Practice models, it was suggested, were such a resource. The aim of the project was to: develop a range of practice models that could be used by practitioners in real life contexts and have a high impact on improving teaching and learning practice. We worked with two definitions of practice models. Practice models are: 1. generic approaches to the structuring and orchestration of learning activities. They express elements of pedagogic principle and allow practitioners to make informed choices (JISC 2006) However, however effective a learning design may be, it can only be shared with others through a representation. The issue of representation of learning designs is, then, central to the concept of sharing and reuse at the heart of JISC’s Design for Learning programme. Thus practice models should be both representations of effective practice, and effective representations of practice. Hence we arrived at the project working definition of practice models as: 2. Common, but decontextualised, learning designs that are represented in a way that is usable by practitioners (teachers, managers, etc).(Mod4L working definition, Falconer & Littlejohn 2006). A learning design is defined as the outcome of the process of designing, planning and orchestrating learning activities as part of a learning session or programme (JISC 2006). Practice models have many potential uses: they describe a range of learning designs that are found to be effective, and offer guidance on their use; they support sharing, reuse and adaptation of learning designs by teachers, and also the development of tools, standards and systems for planning, editing and running the designs. The project took a practitioner-centred approach, working in close collaboration with a focus group of 12 teachers recruited across a range of disciplines and from both FE and HE. Focus group members are listed in Appendix 1. Information was gathered from the focus group through two face to face workshops, and through their contributions to discussions on the project wiki. This was supplemented by an activity at a JISC pedagogy experts meeting in October 2006, and a part workshop at ALT-C in September 2006. The project interim report of August 2006 contained the outcomes of the first workshop (Falconer and Littlejohn, 2006). The current report refines the discussion of issues of representing learning designs for sharing and reuse evidenced in the interim report and highlights problems with the concept of practice models (section 2), characterises the requirements teachers have of effective representations (section 3), evaluates a number of types of representation against these requirements (section 4), explores the more technically focused role of sequencing representations and controlled vocabularies (sections 5 & 6), documents some generic learning designs (section 8.2) and suggests ways forward for bridging the gap between teachers and developers (section 2.6). All quotations are taken from the Mod4L wiki unless otherwise stated

Quality Enhancement Themes: the First Year Experience. Curriculum Design for the First Year

This report outlines the work and outcomes of a practice-focused development project 'Curriculum design for the first year'. The project was one of nine funded by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) under the First-Year Experience Enhancement Theme of the Scottish quality enhancement agenda. The stages of this curriculum design project included: completing a literature review; running staff workshops to gather and disseminate information; holding student focus groups to gather students, views and experiences of the curriculum; collecting case studies of interest to the sector; and reporting findings to the sector. Key findings from the literature are presented in this report. They include the need to adopt student-centred active learning strategies (Harvey, Drew and Smith, 2006; Oliver-Hoyo and Allen, 2005; Barefoot, 2002) and the importance of providing early formative feedback to students (Davidson and Young, 2005; Barefoot, 2002). Many suggestions for improving learning and teaching strategies have been adopted at module level, but could be implemented strategically across the breadth of a programme curriculum. Kift and Nelson (2005) supported this view and argued that it is equally important to support these principles with systemic university-wide change, including administrative and support programmes that are also integrated with the curriculum and student needs

Synthesizing Social and Cognitive Approaches in SLA

In an effort to investigate developmental episodes in additional language learning using both cognitive and social frameworks, this working paper presents results of a pilot study based on a task-based language learning session. A total of forty participants at a Japanese university carried out a pedagogical task in five steps, including both interactive and independent steps. No instruction was provided. Approximately 3,000 responses were collected and examined for comprehension of target forms, and for the rationales provided for form selection. The quantitative analysis indicates significant gains in comprehension and the qualitative data show a shift in the trajectory of participant thinking as a result of participating in a task session. Commentaries from participants provide insights into the social and cognitive aspects of their developmental processes