Social media, the democratisation of knowledge and physiotherapy. Can they play nice together?

How can teachers improve their teaching using concepts that matter? (Prof. Joke Denekens)

We have to reduce the context, content and noise when moving from a clinical setting to an educational setting. In an educational setting, we have to create context and content

There are, in principle, similarities between South health system and the Belgium health system. Different scales and context, but problems exist nonetheless

Development of competencies is an ongoing process, because the health system, science and society is changing all the time

Millers pyramid is a simple model of competence

Students work for what you inspect, not what you expect

Drowning in words (Athol Kent)

Teachers don’t know what student’s don’t know, so we might use language / concepts that students aren’t familiar with. Relates to Bechers’ notion of tribes

knowledge is gained by understanding, but before you can understand concepts, you must understand language

Developed a self-teaching concept that is computer based i.e. a dictionary of terms (what do students need to know to converse in this “tribe”

Students self-test when they think they are ready and they need 80% to pass

Interesting discussion following presentation. Will be great to extend the platform to include not only definitions, but deeper concepts. Athol suggested they are moving towards offering multiple levels of access i.e. superficial for quick review, more in-depth content for further though, and also adding links to more material. I suggested making an open wiki for the project, which would allow faculty to scaffold / structure it, but students could also participate in the direction it goes.

Knowledge and attitudes of Wits medical students concerning the role of nurses in the healthcare team (O Oyedele)

When doctors and patients work together, patient care is improved

Negative stereotypes hinder effective collaboration

When groups from different disciplines do work together, they end up having higher levels of respect for each other

Study looked students perceptions following an interdisciplinary module where medical students are taught by nurses during a “nursing block”

Nurses should have an equal “social” status as doctors? That’s a perception determined by society, not doctors. Wouldn’t it be more relevant to find out if nurses should enjoy the same “professional” status as doctors?

Some stereotypes about nurses persist among medical students at Wits

But there were also clear benefits to nurses teaching medical students on nurse-orientated blocks.

Reflection sucks – Avoiding the black hole: medical student responses to formal reflection during an academic service learning module (D Cameron)

Students have weekly, facilitated reflection sessions, as well as written reflections before, during and after the sessions – during a 4 week academic service learning module in a Primary Healthcare Clinic

Reflective learning:

• What happened? What did I do? How did you feel?
• Why did this happen? (various points of view) → reviewing concepts
• Does this make sense in relation to what I know? → theorising and forming new ideas
• Planning for the future, how will this influence practice

Do students grasp the concepts of reflection?

Asked students what has happened during the past week to influence students opinions of reflection, and then convince a colleague why they believed that

Perceived benefits:

• Personal growth
• Self-insight
• Camaraderie
• Self-confidence
• Changed attitude to service

“Nobody can take my reflections away from me”

Some students dislike written reflection, but are OK with verbal reflection

Students have had negative experiences where they write reflections but don’t receive feedback, this frustrates students

Students are briefly introduced to Kolb’s cycle to provide some context to the students

The differences in perceptions in GEMP III and GEMP IV students in the exposure to expected case competencies of internal medicine at the 3 Wits academic hospitals (F Indeviri)

Reclassification of one of the hospitals led to a reduction in the number of common conditions seen at that hospital

Few students are satisfied with the level of exposure to competencies they receive

Students felt that the block rotation was too short to adequately cover the core competencies

Students also preferred to go to hospitals where they would see a greater variety of common conditions that would allow them to gain greater exposure to core competencies

The scholarship of pedagogy in the health sciences: On teaching, learning and qualitative variation (Shirley Booth)

Scholarship is a hallmark of academic professions

Teaching and research should be placed on an equal footing, and promotion strategeies should take it into account

Scholarships of discovery, application, integration and teaching (Boyer, 1990)

It’s important to reflect on your own practices, as well as the practices of colleagues

Scholarship of teaching (Kreber, 2002)

• Excellent teachers – full participation and approval of colleagues and students
• Expert teachers – making full use of resources
• Scholarly teachers – all of the above, but also sharing outcomes / results as local and global knowledge

Academics conceptions of the SoT&L (Trigwell, Martin, Benjamin & Prosser, 2000, pg. 160)

• Scholarship (discovery, application, integration, teaching)
• Scholarship of teaching (making teaching insights public)
• Scholarship of teaching and learning (as above, with learning brought into focus)

How do we bring learning into focus? Do we give students the essence of what they need to know, or do we open it up to allow them to identify what they need to know?

Methodologies for SoTL

• Ad hoc approaches
• Informed by disciplinary research
• Educational theory (often from sociology or psychology)
• Educational research approaches (quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods)
• Phenomenography – a purely educational (or pedagogical) research approach: an analysis of qualitative variation which brings learning into focus

• 1029. Student Engagement Techniques for Seminars « Tomorrow’s Professor Blog

  • THE STUDENT ENGAGEMENT TECHNIQUES (SETs) are fifty field-tested learning activities that one or more college teachers have found effective in engaging students. Each SET promotes active learning by requiring students to participate in activities such as reading, writing, discussing, problem solving, or reflecting.
  • “Seminar” helps students prepare for and participate in an in-depth, focused, and meaningful small-group discussion of a text. Students bring their marked-up copies and essay to class, and they use these as their ticket to participate in a highly structured small-group discussion.
  • The structure of the small-group discussion provides even shy and diffident students and non-native speakers with a platform to practice their voice.
  • 1.  Select a text that is conceptually rich
  • 2.  Craft a prompt for a writing assignment that connects to the reading
  • 3.  Create a handout that provides students with directions for both the reading and discussion
  • 4.  Outside of class, students read the document, marking and then prioritizing the passages that they found to be most interesting, provocative, puzzling, and so forth and that they want to discuss with the group. They also write a brief essay in response to the instructor-developed prompt. This preparation is their ticket to a small group
  • 5.  The teacher forms prepared students into groups of 4-6. (Either dismiss unprepared students, or allow them to observe in fishbowl fashion, sitting in chairs outside a group, listening to the discussion but not participating.)
  • 6.  In round-robin fashion, each student selects one of his or her high priority passages
  • and then briefly explains why it was selected
  • 7.  After every student has contributed, students respond to what they heard from one or two of the other participants
  • 8.  Students enter into a free-flowing discussion, sharing what they learned or found most meaningful, and as much as possible connecting their comments to specific passages in the text.
  • 9.  After discussion, students add further comments, reflections, or insights as a postscript to their essays and submit them to the instructor.
  • This technique is designed for a face-to-face environment. However, the basic steps can be adapted for an online class
  • Most students will need guidance on how to read critically and how to contribute effectively to the discussion
  • 1.  What does the text say?
  • 2.  What does the text mean?
  • 3.  Why is this important?
  • When assessing seminar behaviors one can ask, How does a person contribute to the seminar? To what degree does he or she engage in the following three kinds of behaviors?
  • A.  Introduce substantive points
  • B. Deepen the discussion
  • C.  Facilitate group exploration

• Write good papers

  • a good 4-sentence abstract is: (1) state the problem (2) say why it is interesting (3) say what your solution achieves (4) say what follows from your solution.

• Mohamed Amine Chatti’s ongoing research on Technology Enhanced Learning: TEL is NOT a Technology Issue

  • In my eyes, the challenge is not to mimic old ways of doing things with new technology, based on traditional institutional norms and values, but to first test, challenge, and eventually change the norms that govern our educational models before introducing new technologies. The problem of TEL is not a technology problem, but rather a cultural and pedagogical one.

I got back yesterday from Geekretreat in Stanford Valley (beautiful, by the way) and these are some of my thoughts after reflecting on the experience. The theme of this year’s retreat was (broadly) the role of the internet in South African education, which is what motivated me to apply for a scholarship. I have to agree with @pete_flynn, the retreat completely exceeded my expectations. I was worried that it would be a group of self-interested business-types, who would spend the weekend telling each other how cool they were. I’m happy to say that my perceptions were completely overturned. It’s been a long time since I’ve been around so many friendly, interesting and intelligent people.

As far as the structure of the weekend went, I loved the idea of the open grid format, and my initial concern that the event would devolve into chaos was unfounded. I liked that not every timeslot was “serious”, with the skillshare sessions being both entertaining and providing a lighter note to the sometimes intense discussion.

I was fortunate enough to have a “talking head” session, where I got some great feedback from the small group discussion around some of the challenges I’m coming across in my research. The value of the session was in the alternative ideas presented to me, which I almost certainly wouldn’t have come up with alone. In fact, I think that’s the essence of what the weekend was about…that you’re more likely to change your thinking around an idea if you have a conversation around it. And there was plenty of conversation. I can’t remember a single moment when people weren’t engaging with each other around some project or idea.

I wasn’t lucky enough to have a conversation with everyone who was there, but during the ones I did have, I came to realise that we have some very smart and talented people in the South African tech industry who are capable of making a real difference in the country. And while many of the projects and ideas I came across were interesting, the following were particularly note-worthy (at least, to me):

• Cognician by Barry and Patrick Kayton – a tool for engaging with concepts and ideas that has already changed how I think about my teaching
• Marlon Parker from CPUT and his community outreach projects using social media
• The Peer 2 Peer University, with whom I have a commitment in 2010 to create and possibly run a module (now that it’s online, I have no choice but to go through with it)
• Sam Christie and his ideas around gaming in education. Not the boring, self-righteous “educational” games that all kids hate (and rightly so), but real, entertaining games that can highlight important life skills

Although I found the event to be an inspiring and intensely motivational experience, I do have some critical feedback for the organisers that I hope will be considered for future events. Please don’t see this as negativity. They’re just my own observations:

• You can’t have a real conversation about this big a deal (i.e. the internet / education in South Africa) without any representation from the country’s largest demographic, the poor and disempowered. To borrow a phrase from the disability movement: “Nothing about us, without us”
• If you’re going to have a discussion around online education, try to get some input from the people who are actually doing it. The most obvious example would’ve been to invite a representative from UNISA. I’m sure they have very clear ideas about the challenges faced in South African online education
• I wasn’t sure if I agreed with @EveD’s comment around the lack of a defined set of goals. As a researcher and teacher, I’m probably biased in that I believe objectives can more clearly guide a process. However, she adds that we probably ended up with a more innovative and creative event as a result of that lack of defined parameters. Perhaps in the future, participants could collaborate on the objectives (either prior to, or at the beginning of the event) but still retain an open structure in which discussion can take place
• I would avoid making premature announcements of success at this early stage. If it ends up not being the success you proclaimed, people will remember. It’s easy to feel fired up and ready to take on the world after an awesome event like this one. But, we all made commitments of our time and resources that we may find difficult to honour when other priorities loom. Can I suggest that we work towards making a huge proclamation of the success of Geekretreat 2010, at Geekretreat 2011?

Having said that, I think the event clearly had a huge impact on everyone who was there, and who are going to go on to do great things in the coming year. I know there are a few projects I’ll definitely be watching (and hopefully be participating in) over the next few months. I wish everyone I had the pleasure of meeting this weekend a fantastic year in which all of your dreams are realised through the collaborative efforts of the beautiful people at Geekretreat.

Note: Thanks to @paul_furber for some of the great pics that I stole to use here. Also, a huge thanks to the sponsors (Yola, Seacom, IS, Skyrove, Orca wireless, Econsultanct, Jackie Scala, Old Mutual, White Wall Web), as well as Heather Ford, Eve D and Justin Spratt), without whom Geekretreat just wouldn’t be possible.

As part of their clinical placements, our students are required to complete some reflective components and submit them along with their clinical files at the end of the block. These reflections are usually in the form of SWOT analyses, SPAR stories, reflective journals or critical reflections of journal articles. The writing exercises are meant to encourage students to reflect on meaningful experiences during the placement, but which actually end up being “busy work”, a meaningless requirement to pass the block.

This lack of reflection (or rather, the lack of understanding around the process and benefits of reflection) seems to be a common problem in education. This article from Tomorrow’s Professor highlights the issue and offers some insight that I think is quite useful.

Writing is thinking, whereas students think that thinking is what happens after writing

• Students need to have a variety of activities to write about i.e. we shouldn’t necessarily be telling them what topics to write on
• Practicing “freewriting” (different to stream of consciousness) may be a way for students to discover things they hadn’t realised they thought or felt (grammar / spelling / structure isn’t important here)
• Encourage students’ unique voices to come through. (I’ve experienced how powerful this can be during an ethics assignment I gave my third year class. See my post: Giving students a voice in physiotherapy ethics)
• Begin the class with a 10 minute writing exercise. Don’t give a theme or topic, let students write about whatever is on their mind. Later on in class, ask them to freewrite about the topic you’ve just covered. The first session is a warm-up for the second, and the output is often better as a result
• A journal is a safe place to explore personal creativity
• Writing tasks must be associated with feedback (not necessarily grades in order to be meaningful
• Ask students to select 2 pieces of their writing from the course and to write a reflection on why those 2 pieces were chosen (i.e. a meta-reflection), submitting all 3 for grading (this is hard to grade)
• Model the behaviour you expect from the students, so when they’re freewriting, so should you
• Writing / journaling should be integrated with the course, not a separate activity