Category: Education
-
Critical digital pedagogy: Weapon of mass instruction
Update (12-02-18): You can now download the full chapter here (A critical pedagogy for online learning in physiotherapy education) and the edited collection here. Update (22-02-17): This post has been modified from the original. Changes include updated in-text citations, minor grammatical improvements and an added reference list. Yesterday I posted the first section of my…
-
Critical digital pedagogy: Command and control
Update (12-02-18): You can now download the full chapter here (A critical pedagogy for online learning in physiotherapy education) and the edited collection here. Update (22-02-17): This post has been modified from the original. Changes include updated in-text citations, minor grammatical improvements and an added reference list. Yesterday I shared the background for this short…
-
The future of education in complex systems
This is the first draft of an Editorial I wrote for the open access African Journal of Health Professions Education, which will be coming out soon. Health and education systems are increasingly recognised as complex adaptive systems that are characterised by high levels of uncertainty and constant change as a result of rich, non-linear interactions…
-
What If High School Were More Like Kindergarten?
What if high school were more like kindergarten? by Ashley Lamb-Sinclair I have a strange-looking, handmade bust of Yoda sitting atop my desk at school. I made this statue in a high-school art class because the teacher asked us to create a life-like bust of a human face. While molding my sculpture, I was exploring…
-
Five Reasons Why CAPS is Harming Our Children
Five reasons why CAPS is harming our children, by Marina Goetze CAPS is the Curriculum Assessment Policy Statement that describes the South African national curriculum for Grades R – 12. I don’t work in the basic education sector but I have friends who do and this is something they talk about all the time. You could probably say…
-
Our students succeed despite their education, not because of it
Note: Thank you to Dave Nicholls from the Critical Physiotherapy Network for his insight and comments that helped inform this post. Foucault said that the most dangerous ideas were the ones that we’re not even aware of; the ones we accept as being fundamentally true. He emphasised the need to examine our everyday practices and to critically analyse the…
-
Stop complaining about the “knowledge-practice gap”
The “knowledge-practice gap” is a well known problem in health professions education and an enormous amount of time is spent complaining about how difficult it is to narrow the gap. The truth is, the knowledge-practice gap is a problem of our own making, and the name we’ve given this problem hints at the answer. We’ve set…
-
Some thoughts on education from two interviews
I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts on my hour long commute to work every day. One of my favourite series is the Tim Ferriss Show, because I get a lot of insight into my own academic practices from listening to these high performers from other domains. Earlier this week I listened to Tim interview Chris…
-
Technology is no longer a luxury for universities – it’s a necessity
This is a republication of my article on The Conversation. See bottom of the post for the link to the original. In the world’s new knowledge economy, innovation and technological change are recognised as the primary drivers of progress. Technological and digital literacy will be a crucial part of helping many countries move beyond their…
-
Assessing teams instead of individuals
Patient outcomes are almost always influenced by how well the team works together, yet all of the disciplines conduct assessments of individual students. Yes, we might ask students who they would refer to, or who else is important in the management of the patient, but do we ever actually watch a student talk to a…
-
Physiotherapy in 2050: Ethical and clinical implications
This post describes a project that I began earlier this week with my 3rd year undergraduate students as part of their Professional Ethics module. The project represents a convergence of a few ideas that have been bouncing around in my head for a couple of years and are now coming together as a result of…
-
Physiotherapy education for the 21st century
Note: This article was first posted on the Critical Physiotherapy Network. Thanks to CPN for permission to cross-post here. The beginning of the 21st century has seen more technological advances than any other time in our history, at an accelerating rate of change. At the time of writing, we are seeing the introduction of robotics,…
-
Without anyones permission: The open web and online learning
As teaching and learning activities move into online and blended learning environments we need to think carefully about how we use those spaces, which is often determined by the features of the platforms and services we choose. One topic in the field on online learning that’s been getting a lot of attention, is the MOOC (the New York…
-
Abstract: Student Success and Engagement project
Our faculty has implemented a 3 year research project looking at improving Student Success and Engagement in the faculty. The project is being coordinated across several departments in the faculty and is the first time that we are collaborating on this scale. I will be using this blog as a public progress report of the project,…
-
An international project in professional ethics
Earlier this year I began working with several colleagues on an international module in professional ethics. We’re going to spend 2015 collaboratively designing a module that students from a variety of undergraduate physiotherapy programmes can complete, in both online and face-to-face contexts. The project builds on the work I’ve done previously as part of my PhD research (these notes…
-
Maria Montessori: On discipline
“Discipline must come through liberty…. We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined. We call an individual disciplined when he is master of himself.” Maria Montessori
-
Illich: “Universal education through schooling is not feasible”
Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand…
-
Using open source software in higher education
Universities and other higher education institutions are increasingly moving towards what many are calling the “connected campus“. While this move brings with it many benefits for students, it can also be expensive to implement. In 2008 I wrote a short post entitled “Open source alternatives to proprietary applications“. This was before the launch of the…
-
PHT402 online course accreditation
The #pht402 Professional Ethics course has just been accredited by the South African Society of Physiotherapists and Health Professions Council of South Africa for 6 Level 2 Ethics CPD points. If you are a South African physiotherapist and would like to take part in the course, please register here before 9th August. Over the past…
-
Encouraging students to flourish
TED Talk – Ken Robinson: How to escape education’s death valley Another great presentation from Ken Robinson where he talks about how the current design of school systems ignore the principles that encourage children to flourish. If you sit kids down hour after hour doing low-grade clerical work, don’t be surprised if they start to…