Day 77 - I love it when a plan comes together

Today, I gave the inaugural lecture in my research centre's new series of open lectures entitled 'Music in a Globalised World'. Given the modest advertising I put out, I was actually quite pleased with the audience of around 15 who heard me speak and asked questions afterwards.

In the large scheme of things, that's not a huge number, but I'm not going to fixate on that right now. I'm very aware that everything has to start somewhere and we can't always expect the first event in a series to be oversubscribed. A reputation builds, and this is what I'm hoping for my little series.

The lecture was videoed, and, once I've edited it, I'm planning to upload it to iTunes U so that it is available to everyone with internet access. This is my plan for the entire series, should the speakers be happy, as it enables us to kill two birds with one stone. On the one hand, we are building a genuine research community within the campus that complements the existing research communities, but on the other, we are also dipping a toe in the water of open access online presence.

When I was an undergraduate student, I attended the department's guest lecture series and got quite a lot out of it. When I was a PhD student at the same institution, I was a regular fixture. When I came to my current institution to teach, I did really miss that. I think it's important for academics to continue to engage with what their peers are developing, and that research doesn't just stop with our own interests.

I think it is especially important to provide a platform for academics to hear their colleagues, within the same institution, speak about their research, as it builds awareness and mutual respect, and although I think that we largely share a lot of respect for each others' teaching, respect for research can only generally function on the basis of productivity and visibility rather than on interest and quality.

So today was a tiny step in developing this idea. I'm hoping that the audience will return in October for the next session and that they will grow.

Day 61 - To make the punishment fit the crime

I spent what felt like a lot of today compiling the programme handbook before the first day of Freshers' Week.
In the end, it is 47 pages long, and over 10,000 words. If I had written them all, I would be feeling pretty proud of myself, but I mostly copied and pasted them from other sources (although I feel slightly proud of my assessment matrix at the very end).
What bothered me about the whole process was primarily that it is in the wrong format.

I think that the format you make something available really matters. If you are handing out a physical handbook, this has a different function to an online handbook. What I have been required to create this year has been neither. It looks like a printed book, but functions like an online handbook.

This creates a couple of problems. The first is that, as a Word document, one can follow all the embedded links, but it remains an editable document (although there are ways around that of course) and the glossy pictures mean that it is huge (around 10MB), but as a PDF, unless it's converted using proprietorial Adobe software, you can't follow the links (although this reduces it down to 5MB). In order to read it, one has to download it, and do we really need such enormous files? The second problem is the logistical problem of reading the document. Getting from one page to the next is fine, but if you then want to go back to the contents and then hop forward, hop back, etc., it is not really a very good format for doing this.

It amazes me that, while we have the online VLE that we have, that we do not make more use of it for exercises like this. A web-based handbook in the same environment that the students are required to use, that doesn't need to be downloaded, and that is easily navigable, is surely what we should be working on instead of this ineffectual hybrid.

I suppose my point is that if you want a printed handbook, provide us with a template for a printed handbook, and if you want an online handbook, provide us with a template for an online handbook. Stop hedging your bets and putting all your eggs in the 'corporate' basket.

Day 43 - Dreadful email

Today is my last day of my annual leave and what bothers me most is catching up on email.
I have never been very good at dealing with email, or at least in keeping up to date with it.
I have literally tens of thousands of emails in my inbox dating back to the start of my employment (2008), and no real sense of how to deal with it all.
I've got a lot better at responding to email (still some room for improvement of course), but no closer to coming up with a sensible and systematic way of organising it.

How does anyone decide what you need to keep and what you can delete?
I've been so pleased that I've kept correspondence that seemed trivial at the time on a few occasions that I don't just want to start trashing everything.

I think I might start experimenting with adding an automatic rule to incoming emails, to initially filter them into folders for students, colleagues, and leave external mail in the inbox. I can see that this might be a system that gets polished over time, but I think that it has some merit. I'm thinking that I might even filter student email into year group, which would then mean that I could archive it most efficiently.

I think I'll start small and work out from there. No point trying to solve every problem all at once.

Day two: All about e-learning

• Q: Can you think of an instance when you might use e-learning in your teaching?

• A: If the library burned down.

This was me, responding to a question posed in a 2003 session for postgraduates who were doing teaching at Durham University. It sounds pretty stupid now (to be fair, it probably sounded pretty stupid then too) but things have changed a lot. My first email address was provided by Durham University in 1996, and that was also the first time I had free access to the internet, which I found quite challenging. I wasn't technologically ignorant - we'd had a computer in the house from at least 1984 and I had word-processed most of my coursework from 1993 onwards.

Everything that I teach now is supported by Moodle, a VLE. The slides from my lectures appear there, copies of handouts, my module descriptors, assessment briefs, dropboxes for online submission, and additional resources. Gone are the days of using overhead projectors and battered handouts. That's pretty standard in HE nowadays.

I miss though, the idea of students taking notes. A lot of mine don't. They rely on a combination of the slides and their memory. I said, deliberately, that I miss 'the idea of students taking notes'. Raking through my own undergraduate notes in the attempt to find something useful for my teaching, and discovered that they were so patchy and banal, they were useless to me. Having said that, I think that there's a lot of research done into how writing things down helps convert them from short-term to long-term memory so perhaps the act of note-taking in and of itself is a valuable learning tool irrespective of whether it produces a useful result (c.f. Derrida). I'll pick up on this later.

Today, I had an email from a student telling me that the 'online book' to which I had sent him a link was, for some reason, unavailable. It is unavailable because it was a link to the library catalogue, identifying a physical resource. This is actually pretty often the case, in my experience, with undergraduates (and you can't really blame them) until they're working on a dissertation or similar. We provide so many resources through online tools like Moodle, and they have access to the whole internet, so why bother reading a book?

I find this a tricky one. I want my students to use physical books and to use online resources. I want them to fall in love with the library (and by 'the library' I suppose I'm really signifying some kind of Platonic Ideal Library). Apart from anything else, some of my happiest memories of undergraduate study are being buried in the outsized scores section of the library marveling at the strange and wonderful notation I was discovering for the first time. I want them to have that experience. But that's the problem with teaching: you can't teach your 18-year-old self; you have teach the students that are there.

Another problem with online resources (and with the much-vaunted celebration of Digital Natives) is a common failure to identify and respect primary sources. A student references a blog; the lecturer looks up this reference and finds that the blog is referencing a published book. A lack of critical engagement as well leads to academic equivocality - a blog written by a 6-year-old is regarded as holding as much authority as a blog by an established academic. This isn't always a bad thing as we lionise our 'prize academics' probably beyond their modesty, but I think it's a matter of being able to recognise good methodology no matter what platform is accessed. I am struck by the naivete of many students who prize the opinions of anyone they can find through a Google search over their own powers of synthesis and logic, but I think I'm getting away from my main intention with this post here. I'll return to academic study skills tomorrow (joy).

 I met the librarian with specific responsibility for the music collection in passing on Monday and we talked a little bit about this. We've agreed that there may be ways to incorporate library skills into performance modules (repertoire hunt, for example), and I will be designing a 'scavenger hunt' for the new 1st year students that will require them to hunt out physical resources as well as online resources.

Perhaps this is the answer: more quizzes, more prizes. Fool them into becoming familiar with these study environments in the guise of light entertainment (as posited by Benjamin I suppose!). But it takes time and energy to design these - it's not just a matter of saying 'ah yes! we will do this'.

From the initial question posed to our class in 2003, I feel now that we are faced with its opposite question:

• Can you think of an instance when you might rely on students reading a physical book?

At present, my answer is that I would be hard pressed to insist upon this. Even if it is scanned in and made available on Moodle, I find it difficult to get an entire class to read anything. If they have to venture into the library...