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Showing posts from October, 2014

Become like water my friend.

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Check out the quote below from the late Bruce Lee: “The great mistake is to anticipate the outcome of the engagement; you ought not to be thinking of whether it ends in victory or defeat. Let nature take its course, and your tools will strike at the right moment.” - Bruce Lee Bruce Lee in 1946 - Unknown It encompasses what I have been thinking about with regards to my course observations and what I have learnt so far about teaching methods, session plans, activity structure etc My train of thought has been building over the last few weeks as I've been inundated with methods and strategies, Vygotsky, Laurillard, Collis and Kolb etc It's mounted to a single question I was asked to come up with to ask a guest speaker for a webinar this morning. The question was this - 'Do you think that there is too much emphasis on teaching methods and strategies and not enough around the skills needed to read both learner and environment then to subsequently adapt?' Due

Threshold Concepts, Jared and Aperture Science Laboratories.

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I haven't posted in a while, my partner and I had a baby, called Jared :) However I'll keep my baby talk to personal networks, in this post I'd like to reflect on a recent session I had with a course I'm undertaking at my institution. The course is PgC in Academic Practice and this weeks session was around 'Designing for Learning' specifically looking at 'Threshold Concepts'. The term was coined in 2003 with the following definition: “A threshold concept can be considered as akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. It represents a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something without which the learner cannot progress. As a consequence of comprehending a threshold concept there may thus be a transformed internal view of subject matter, subject landscape, or even world view. This transformation may be sudden or it may be protracted over a considerable period of time, wi