We spent most of the first day assisting the first year (2011) Fellows with the research projects that they’ll be implementing this year. I was surprised at how much more confident I felt in terms of being able to give feedback this year. Last year I felt a bit lost a lot of the time and wasn’t really sure of myself. It’s funny how you don’t really notice personal development until you’re in a similar situation as you were before and can compare your previous responses to current ones.

Over the course of the next few days we spent a lot of time discussing the following main topics, often using our individual projects as a foundation:

• Various aspects of effective leadership
• Research dissemination in the form of oral and poster presentations, and abstract development
• The scholarship of teaching
• Programme evaluation
• Creating a portfolio of professional development

During the course of the session I had some really interesting conversations with other fellows around their research projects, which I’m hoping will lead to some interesting projects.

One of these is the possibility of introducing a clinical placement for physio students into a rural clinical school in Worcester. Some of our students want to go back to practice physiotherapy in small, rural villages in remote parts of the country, and a rural clinical setting would better prepare them for this.

The other project was one implemented by a palliative care physician who introduced an integrated tutorial on palliative care with small groups of students. Since I had a few students who shared personal experiences around patients with terminal illnesses, and their struggles around related issues, I thought I could learn a lot from attending the tutorial with the medical students and seeing if there’s anything that could translate to our students. I teach a section on Death and Dying in the Professional Ethics module, and this tutorial sounds really inspiring in terms of changing my approach.

On the whole, this session has been far less intensive than the first one, although I didn’t have much free time. I found that I spent a lot more time in discussion with other fellows, which was a great learning experience.

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I learnt a lot from the experience and together with the feedback I got from my colleagues, will be able to refine the workshop for next year. One of the main suggestions was to add more interactivity to the session. I definitely agree that this is one area I could’ve improved on, especially with the view to making it more dynamic.

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I know that Twitter is a public platform and as such, I believe that anything posted there is in the public domain (although I’m not sure what license the content of the stream defaults to). I wonder how many people tweet with the conscious knowledge that they are participating in a public conversation that anyone can appropriate for whatever purpose. Or can they? Does the concept of intellectual property even apply here? If I say something original in public, which gets overheard by someone who passes off that idea as their own, what recourse do I have? I first came across this a while ago when I heard of a publication of a book of tweets, which didn’t go down well with the original authors(?).

I also wonder what effect it would have if the researchers had informed the conference participants that their tweets would be aggregated and analysed? Would the posts have been more “academic” in nature as a result? Since we usually inform research participants of the fact that they (or rather their behaviour, actions, thoughts, etc.) are going to be studied, and unless the study is well designed, this knowledge will change their behaviour, it seems that this “unconscious” participation may provide a more authentic version of the conversation.

But is it ethical?

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@cristinacost You’re really getting around on the conference scene lately in reply to cristinacost #

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The way we currently assess students has no equivalent in practice. For some of our modules (e.g. Management), it makes more sense to allow students to write the test in a computer lab where they have a set time limit but can find what they need online. When would anyone of us be expected to know how to write up a business plan without being able to consult other sources? This would allow us to highlight in another way, that memorising content is not an appropriate strategy to be an effective physiotherapist in the real world. In case anyone is wondering, I’m not suggesting that students don’t need to be able to recall facts…they will obviously still need to memorise some stuff, particularly in the clinical components of the curriculum (e.g. you need to know what hypertonus is before you can address it). But there are definitely some areas of the curriculum where memorising facts is an terrible idea.

The “Professional Ethics” module is one of these areas. Currently assessed in a written examination format, this module has so many alternative approaches that could be more realistic and effective, including small group discussions (my current preference). Students would have to prepare in advance, familiarising themselves with the main concepts that the exam will cover (which would be provided to them beforehand). The exam could take place over a 30 minute period with the examiner guiding the conversation through a set number of topics that cover various important themes in professional ethics and ethical reasoning. Each group of students would certainly have a different conversation, so consistency would be hard to determine e.g. did all groups actually have the same exam?. A marking rubric is one way that could be used to ensure that each student is assessed on a range of the same themes as every other student e.g. participation, comprehension, communication skills, conflict resolution, etc.

I imagine a series of a few of these small group discussions taking place over the course of the year, potentially with different formats and objectives. There would be no summative assessment at the end of the year, only a few formative assessments during. I”m going to start putting together a proposal for the department to change the way the professional ethics module is assessed.

Any feedback or comments around this idea would be most welcome.

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