CETL conference

At the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) conference on campus today and tomorrow, I notice the word engagement in a lot of places. For example:

• MBA pathways: expectations, engagement and reality: does the MBA produce critically engaged managers?
• designing learning activities in second life for student engagement
• critical engagement in management and business education
• student engagement with e-assessment.

Learning engagement is an area that people are researching. It's research that may overlap with my research that looks at the way people engage with each other on a mutual project, coming with different skills and that situation, like learning, requires elements of communication and knowledgeability. By knowledgeability I don't just mean knowledge transfer but an ability to transfer knowledge by teaching others or learning from others, an ability to learn, an ability to teach. You need communication to activate and use that knowledgeability. The combination is engagement; engagement between people on projects requires the same elements as engagement in learning.

Viva done

Colleague's walked in from viva - she's passed!


Here are the hopefuls lining up to find how she did it, so they'll follow on in a year or two.

OUBS research student day

We had a couple of useful seminars this morning. Sarah Robinson had lots of good advice on methodology and made me ready to rush off and start writing the methodology chapter now, but I've too much else to do, so I'll just have to keep my notes where I can find them.

In the afternoon we had the ten minute round table sessions, like last year, with four PhD students and an academic. The second academic, Emma Bell had to leave early, and was replaced by John Storey and Luciano Batista arrived too, so we had some useful voices. But it was still a bit depressing trying to explain what you're doing to people who aren't in your field and perhaps aren't very interested. John said I should take the 'engagement' out of my research question, but I don't know what to replace it with. Value isn't enough, and the NAO has already done heaps of work on value.

Nevertheless, it seemed a more constructive session than the session last year.