Nia Wearn's Research & Tech for Teaching

I’m a member of a few facebook interest groups – and there’s a few I’ve set up myself. The latest of which is one for the Postgraduate students of Staffs Uni – born out of a few conversations at the 3rd annual conference about how alone many of us felt.

The key thing I’ve learn’t so far from other groups I’m members of is that Australians are having a lot more fun with their phd’s then we are. Thesis Haiku competitions, Dance your PHD’s – even the #3MT (Three Mniute Thesis) idea hails from sunny Down Under. I hope a little that we can create a support network within the university – cross faculty and maybe aligned with this mythical graduate school we keep hearing mention of. Maybe we can inject some fun into it as well, even just to let off some steam.

Who knows, I might even try and form it into a proper post grad society at some point in the future (once we’re moved to Stoke I suspect)

Since coming back from Maternity leave in March I’ve found it a little difficult to get back on track – a little out of the loop on a lot of things (not having project students etc) and not all of my office colleagues are in all the time, or they’re off teaching or what not. So I’ve been catching up no the phd stuff I stupidly though I could do on maternity leave, but couldn’t get my brain in gear when I came across a tweet that mentioned a group for parents studying phds – Since I now tick that box I though I’d join, and I’m glad I did.

Its very nice to have a big group of people, doing a similar thing to you, that you can call on for advice, enter into discussions with a generally get along with. There’s shut up and Write Sessions, questions on the true nature of pedagogy, lots of discussion on methodology etc (what’s also nice that unlike real office colleagues you can ignore them if you want to focus on something else) – I’m much more on board with what I was doing, and I’m starting to find the headspace I need to write.

It’s part of a trend I can see of more and more things drifting into the sphere of Facebook – group projects, staff groups, interest groups are all there and used, daily – which means switching off from everything else is increasingly hard. I don’t want to make a separate staff account. I like being able to interact with students, and it’s so useful when they don’t check their e-mails. I just can’t help wondering at what point it will all come crashing down?

One of the coolect ideas from the last Teachnology Supported Learning Showcase was the Creative Communities bottle voting system – if you can call skittles a technology I suppose – anyway, this year for 2A2B we asked them to make kickstarter pitch videos.

One thing I wanted was a very quick response to find out how successful the pitches had been – and since we were holding it in the Red Lecture Theater an online Google Doc form or a Facebook poll wouldn’t have worked. In the past we’ve used paper to hold a popular vote but that’s had it’s own issues when you scale it up to 100’s of people…

So, in a a slightly more dawn markets style, we did marbles-and-plastic-pint-glass voting

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