Willy's Wiki page ... (with due acknowledgement to the Crown & Sceptre Collaborators, the fruits of whose labours - if I've got the technology right - can be endured by clicking on this image here, though it may take an age to download 

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... following where Dave has led so admirably, here's my first tentative stabs at some conference reflections and, simultaneously, my first hesitant steps with wiki technology outside the cloisters of Maja and Mark's very helpful "master class" on the Tuesday pm ...

 

... not what you were expecting?  Then link back to the conference wiki home page post haste.  Alternatively, please feel free to throw as many metaphorical stones as you like by adding, commenting upon or generally doing dastardly deeds to this page and its contents.  I am by inclination, after all, the stone throwing type, notwithstanding my commodious glass house ... and out of dialogue (and conflict, oftentimes) comes change, right?  Which can only ever (or mostly) be a good thing.

 

Taking Dave as my zen master, I shall adopt a bit-at-a-time approach, but since I never found the space and time during the conference - you worked us a tad too hard I thought, folks, for us to find time to be posting online as well - this is very much an after the event reflection, albeit soon enough after the event, I hope, for my memory not to be playing too many tricks, yet far enough away from it for me to have had a limited amount of time for critical reflection upon what was said and done.

 

Rather than being too chronological about things - as an archaeologist, of sorts, it is always good to try to act against type - I thought I'd steal a structure from John Morgan and Ben Williamson's very interesting session on "Enquiring Minds: learners' cultures in the classroom", in which they described a project with two schools in Cornwall, I think, exploring the introduction of IBL approaches into the secondary curriculum.  The link they gave us was to www.enquiringminds.org.uk/ which I hope to explore further when time allows.

 

Anyway, the structure they suggested, stolen from some educational theory bod called Bernstein I think [please someone edit this bit and include the appropriate link/reference so it looks like I know what I'm talking about], broke down the "elements of teaching" thus:

 

• space;
• time;
• language;
• resources

 

and I'll try to use these as loose (sometimes very loose) themes to structure what follows ...

 

Space

 

The spaces provided by the conference organisers were uniformly excellent (from the workshop rooms to residential rooms to the city centre locations we were pointed toward on the Guildford Adventure), although the fact that the floors went from 1 to 20 in the main conference building, whilst the levels went the opposite way from 20 to 1, only added to the confusion engendered by the fiendish institutional signage policies (or lack thereof) ... perhaps this was a deliberate attempt to encourage an exploration of spatial complexity on our part?

 

The workshop rooms were the real eye-opener for me, with "write-on walls" and chairs on wheels as standard (though one or two Sheffield short-arses did point out that the feet of the vertically challenged weren't always able to make full contact with terra firma).  We have a range of new teaching spaces in Sheffield which have real advantages when encouraging online and other technological collaborations between students in the classroom (lots of additional plasma screens, networked PCs in rooms etc. etc.) but, once I came to understand on the second day how the Surrey rooms might come to be used in practice, I am now an instant convert to the less-is-more strategy which they adopt.  The possibilities these rooms create, for groups to come together; reconfigure themselves in multiple different ways; have access to their own bits of group wall on which to doodle; and then split apart again to do the lecture bit too (perhaps an array of spare clipboards could be kept in the corner for such occasions); all elements which encourage real collaboration and risk taking in teaching where wieldy tables and bits of electronic kit sometimes get in the way.  So a big thumbs up for these new spaces.

 

I also very much enjoyed the opportunity provided by the Guildford Adventure to explore parts of the town - fieldtrips form an important part of most modules that I teach, so it was interesting to experience a rather different approach to these, and to compare what happened and what we did with some of the ideas I've tried to experiment with in some of my own fieldtrips over the last few years to make these more interactive and inquiry-based (I remain stung to this day by the comment of one young undergraduate several years ago who described one of my field trips as "A bit like the lectures, only colder").  I'm a strong advocate of take teaching out of or beyond the confines of the classroom at every available opportunity, so alongside those clipboards in the corner, I'd also love to see a hat stand with spare umbrellas in every teaching room so we can get out and about in all weathers ...

 

Talking of weather, this was clearly an issue rather close to the hearts of those of us who'd made it down to the conference from Sheffield on the Sunday afternoon.  We were all sorry that a number of our colleagues never quite made it down - commiserations to Duco, Clare and anyone else in this boat (no pun intended, it being customary to observe, having clearly noted and still run with said pun) ... I was sorry too to receive a succession of mobile phone bulletins from the home front on Monday evening documenting the inexorable rise of the water in our cellar to the plug sockets at skirting board height which we had (foolishly in retrospect) had installed when tanking the whole space two summers ago.  The lights eventually fused around 10.30pm but all power was restored by 8.30am the next morning and all that remains in the cellar to evidence the deluge is half a centimetre of standing water in one corner and a large quantity of soggy lever arch files on the bottom shelves of a series of B&Q's finest plastic shelving units surrounding the walls.  One good way to cut down on one's backlog of articles in the "once photocopied but never read" category, I guess ... 

 

Mustn't grumble though - there are still a large number of communities across South Yorkshire still suffering a very much worse fate than those of us on the hills up the west side of Sheffield whose cellars happen to coincide with those many places where sandstone meets shale [an open goal here for any geologists out there who want to develop or entirely contradict this line of reasoning] - often communities who can ill-afford such events - and our sympathies must be extended to them this weekend as we all brace ourselves in S Yorks for further rain (though the worst I've seen by midday Saturday is a bit of drizzle on our part of Sheffield).

 

So to conclude this section for now, here's a picture to demonstrate that, in matters of weather and global warming, if not necessarily in certain other areas of the economy and the like, all is fair in the north-south divide ...  [and if Margaret would care to share her height with us all then we'll have a truer quantitative measure of the extent of the Guildford floods of 16th September 1968]

 

Time

 

The length of time allowed to each individual sessions (50mins as standard; 3hours for the "master classes"), was a very welcome conference departure and should, I think, be a standard feature of these gatherings.  As hinted above, though, a little more time for coffee, chatting and/or showing off one another's websites and adding to the wiki would also have been welcome.

 

The idea of a set of pre-conference in-house presentations was also a good idea and one worth repeating, I think. 

 

It is almost inevitable that any conference must involve parallel sessions, but given that the meat of the conference sandwich was only 24hours thick (if the pre-conference was the slice of bread with mayonnaise, and the master classes the slice with butter), then seven parallel sessions was perhaps too many, increasing the numbers of choices to be made to new heights of thematic complexity.  Here though, greater immediate use of the wiki would have helped to keep the ideas stirring more widely around the conference ... and it was a shame in this respect that we could not be treated to a sneak preview of the labours of the conference film team at either of the two concluding pleniary sessions.  I look forward to viewing these in due course [is there a link out there we can insert here and now I wonder?]

 

Speaking for myself, narcissist that I am, I was both surprised and gratified to spot a poster in the "resource-base room" on the Tues/Wed morning representing in charicature some of the discussions in my own workshop the day before - I found more or less instant feedback in this form really very helpful, or at least reassuring, in that the artist in residence (and a big thank you to you, whoever you may be), had in his brief visit to the workshop clearly picked up quickly upon some of the ideas I was hoping to explore ... even if my execution left a lot to be desired (see below).

 

 

Language

 

There was clearly a wide mix of EB-IBL-ers present at the conference, with a wide spectrum of experience (from what Michael Eraut would term "novice" to "expert") and, I suspect, differing aims and expectations for the conference as a whole.  I imagine many of these aims were fulfilled in one way or another for many people, but equally I wonder whether the overall task the organisers seem to have set for themselves - in terms of wanting to explore EB-IBL approaches in a generic sense, to get a network of fellow learning-through-enquiry travellers off the ground, to put new ways of facilitating under closer scrutiny (via the master classes, and a call for us all to try to be more creative in our individual sessions), and to consider all the (new?) ramifications of learning in a(n increasingly?) complex world - wasn't ultimately just a little too ambitious for the 24/48 hours we were all together in one place.

 

Personally, I have become increasingly instrumentalist about conferences, inasmuch as I want to garner as much inspiration as I can, in as short an amount of time as possible, to take back and exploit in the day job (so, in my case, class-based teaching and curriculum development rather than writing high falutin' theory of education papers).  For this reason, I probably tended largely towards sessions which sounded like they'd contain stuff and teaching ideas (as well as a smattering of theory too), and/or were dealing with subjects or technologies I was already experimenting or planning to experiment with (blogs, wikis etc.), rather than heading for the more theoretical attempts to understand facilitation of learning for a complex world. 

 

Whilst I'd rate the conference overall a great success, and a solid launch-pad for what I hope will be a long series of future conferences and (through the conference wiki, amongst other places) a flourishing network of practitioner-researchers, and whilst I've certainly quarried a variety of interesting new ideas to try to adapt to my own practice (some of which I intend to share below in the resources section when time permits), I was less convinced overall by the success of our collective exploration of complexity in more general terms.  Indeed this wasn't a theme which seemed to be foregrounded in (m)any of the sessions I attended - perhaps it was more implicit than explicit in all of what we were doing, or perhaps I just wasn't in the right rooms, or listening hard enough?  [open invitation here for tirades of abuse, au contraires, and general disagreement or debate]

 

In my own "workshop", I did pose the following questions, just before breaking everyone up into groups and getting them to discuss something entirely different in a desperate, rushed and inevitably doomed attempt to try to make some of what I had been saying (in true unreconstructed, keep talking and stay in your comfort zone, lecturer style) relevant to what the abstract had suggested I'd be doing (offering an open discussion workshop) - of which more in a moment.  But anyway, I wondered vaguely what the consequences for us of learning in a complex world might be:

 

• should the way we structure learning become more complex to mirror this new reality?
• does increased complexity imply that we must become increasingly analytical to keep on top of this complexity?
• should we be getting back to basics?  After all, that approach may very well have worked for many of us, and many of our former students;
• or should we be managing learner-engagements with different subject matter in a way that enables people to feel more in control of their own learning, for example by carefully bracketing any given field of enquiry so that learners know where the boundaries or limits lie in terms of time, space or disciplinary context?

 

 

 

Finally, to return to the question of language, I was personally unhappy with the way I ended up cobbling together a workshop which fell between at least two different stools.  And since nothing is ever my fault, I'm going to lash out at the organisers instead ... I think the injunction to be creative, experimental et al., in the initial call for papers was an important one in setting the tone for the conference - and, particularly in sessions which I missed (or consciously/sub-consciously avoided?) it seems to have been a real success ... the buzz around David Jacques' empty room, Emilie Crapoulet's music as meaning, and David Hay's concept mapping, all seemed particularly strong, for example.  However, by then collapsing all of the session abstracts into either "scholarly papers" or "workshops" or "master classes", it felt to me at least as though the rather traditional conference language being used may have set up particular expectations of sessions - whether real or imagined - amongst facilitators (certainly the case in my workshop) and participants alike.  Did anyone else feel this, or am I just being an old curmudgeon?

 

As was touched upon in the final session of the conference (and not just by me, I believe), part of the point of EB-IBL-ing in a complex world, perhaps, is that conference sessions and structures need to be kept as fluid and as ad hoc as conference participants (and organisers) will allow, without necessarily forcing facilitators outside their comfort zone ... or at least holding them too closely to their abstract!  So, in short, is there any need to differentiate between "scholarly paper" and "workshop" next time?  Can't we leave more space for us to make it up as we go along, in true wiki posting style? ... but always, of course, with the important underlying goal, amongst others, of keeping ourselves informed by a developing theoretical conversation and literature.

 

My session wasn't all bad though - Dave liked the colours on our Arts and Social Sciences WebCT site (largely the fruits of Tim Herrick's labours) - so here are two pages from it to draw a temporary halt to these ramblings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Great stuff willy.. you make it all come alive in  avery personal and personable way and show us new possibilities..I'd like to extract some of your questions as thoughts for the day..

norman

 

i agree with Norman - this is excellent Willy. I wil catch up with you in a week or so - very busy writing an RDB2 proposal at the mo. Take care and nice to meet you

Dave

 

 

 

 

 

 

Resources