I am taking you with me on an adventure. Okay maybe a micro-adventure, nevertheless if you need a mental break from thinking about work–come along. As pebbles crunch underneath my trailrunners I notice: today smells like adventure, here in Scotland! Adventures smell of summer and soil, petrichor, deep dark woods; they smell of minerals in […]
Recent Posts
SoTL as Strategic Imperative?
I made this a year after setting up the SoTL network in our institution, and this is my visual reflection on the thoughts emerging from this. The first point was that I was wondering if SoTL needs to be a strategic imperative for Higher Education institutions. On one side it fosters evidence based practice, providing […]
Of Jewelry Making and Curriculum Design
good point Danielle about good design degrading – I think that must be true for most things, but then some Celtic jewellery is still incredibly beautiful today, so there's something enduring about good design, even if some of it changes over time #LTHEchat — Virna (@VirnaRossi) June 9, 2021 In the #LTHEchat above Virna Rossi […]
First Time in the City in Months
I met a colleague today. In real life 3D and colour! First time in the Westend in over nine months. It’s strange I forgot how Glasgow smells in the rain. It’s a Weeg thing. Only Glasgow smells like this. When it rains, hues of swamp rise from the Kelvin walkway, dust caked to the sidewalk […]
The Last SoTLwalk
I was gutted to read that the wonderful Dr Natasha Taylor is posting the last SoTLwalk The June SoTL Walk: Our final ramble! – Elemental (rmit.edu.au). So if you have some time join in on the Padlet or on Twitter with the #SoTLwalk hashtag and help celebrate Natasha’s wonderful initiative, which has helped bring people […]
Evaluating learning: an uncertainty principle
Here is my hypothesis: The more we focus on one aspect of the learned, i.e. in exams we force the expression of learning into a specific way and the closer we look at that one specific factor the less we are able to see the effects of said learning more widely. A personal experience example […]
Academia and Buzz Word Bingo
One of the themes of our engagement in #ALTC Winter Conference and #LTHEchat was that the terminology we have chosen to use ‘disruption’ and ‘active learning’ smell too much of buzz-word bingo to sit comfortably with colleagues. And we agree. But … There is also a but … what else are we to use. We […]
Another Attempt at Journalling
Keeping notes, making sense, reflexive practice and doodles A while back I shared my first experiences with bullet journaling as one of the many ‘brain hacks’ I am trying. Unfortunately have to report it doesn’t work well for me, because forming habits is near to impossible. So ended up with these beautifully crafted pages that […]
Transformative Conversations
When the topic for this week’s combined #AdvanceHE_chat and #LTHEchat was announced my first reaction was that I cannot think of any examples of a transformative chat either undertaken with my students, or having experienced for myself. Only to realised that this is not entirely true. While I might not remember a significant Heureka moment […]
#SoTLwalk May 2021: Kindness
The lovely Dr Natasha Taylor from RMIT is at it again this month, with the topic of Kindness. So let’s dive in right away: What role does kindness play in your teaching and professional identity? What does it mean to teach with kindness; to learn with kindness? How can we harness the power of kindness […]
Ethics and SoTL
This blog draft is only from about a month ago, when ethics has been on my mind more than usual. I began writing this post because my colleague and I ran an ethics in SoTL CPD session, but I also had a writing group meeting–a group which emerged from an ethics working group. And to […]
Review: Hochschulbildungsforschung Chapter 5
Scharlau, I. (2019) Sich verständigen. Überlegungen zur Frage der Evidenzbasierung. In Hochschulbildungsforschung (pp. 105-124). Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-20309-2_8 Some quotes from the chapter and some paraphrasing for which I used blackout poetry to help me translate. The rest of translation was done though Google. Hope it makes as much sense as the German… Maybe a […]
The Lockdown Diary
I didn’t publish this post in September 2020 because I thought it might be too soon and we were just going into another lockdown. Sharing some thoughts from my lockdown diary, written about a year ago, moved into a blog post draft some months later and now maybe ready to publish: Diary came up today […]
The Power of Doodle
The origin of this post goes back to 2011, much has changed since, including my own personal development and career. But let’s get the pens out: I was rather keen on going back to the topic of doodles as I have become more and more interested in Sketchnoting, which you could think about as purposeful […]
ADHD and Time Management
From the Archives Why Standard Time Management Strategies don’t work for ADHD. I am working my way through posts that are in draft stage. I believe I had this published and then took it offline again. Because now–almost exactly 10 year later–I have my ADHD diagnosis. And now I know this is an ADHD related […]
