Meeting the Challenges of Change in Postgrad Education

This is a text that might be of interest to PhD supervisors and course coordinators in the School. Meeting the Challenges of Change in Postgraduate Education is an edited collection by Trevor Kerry and claims to take a radical look at the nature of adult learning in the postgraduate context and the implications of this for universities and their courses. Schools have had to undergo major re-assessments about how learning is developed into the curriculum, how learning is delivered to students, and how that learning is assessed. Universities has remained very largely detached from these pedagogical/andragogical issues.

However, the circumstances of higher education provision have changed. There is also real pressure now from vocationalism. Meeting the Challenges of Change in Postgraduate Education places these movements in both a UK and a wider context, examines the nature of learning and teaching in postgraduate education and opens up the debate for rethinking university provision. Trevor Kerry is Professor of Education Leadership at the Centre for Educational Research and Development at Lincoln University, UK. The book will be released June 2010 by Continuum.

April Book Group

April 11th sees the book group return to Joyce's Ulysses. We begin from the passage starting with "Urbane to comfort them, the quaker librarian purred:" (p. 235 in my Penguin Modern Classics edition, see photo above) and will read on up to the break at "The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace" (p. 449). Depending on the edition you're using, it should be a little over 150 pages. For the time being, we will continue to meet at The Known World bookshop in Sturt Street at 2:00pm.

Argument Visualisation Software

I'm tutroing in PHILO 1002 Logic & Reasoning this semester and one of our Moodle weblinks is to a company called AusThink who specialise in developing critical thinking tools. I thought that since the Philosphy programmme at UB has grown from strength to strength in terms of the service teaching now done with Psychology and Human Movement, that I'd pop this info up for general distribution. I think the programme has solid structural and visual merit in terms of information organisation. Particularly appealing to dyslexics too.

Local company AusThink (affiliated with The University of Melbourne) have developed an exciting looking software package for called Rationale: Argument Visualisation Software that assists in the maping out of argumentative essays and workss to exercise critical thinking skills in particular. Currently available for Windows only, AusThink offers a free seven day trial which is well worth the trouble.

I've included the official AusThink Rationale video above, but I've also tracked down a shorter video (below) that includes some testimonials from teaching staff as well as the programme's creator (a lecturer in critical thinking himself). Well worth having a look at these. It would be interesting to see if the University could get a site license for this programme. I'd be interested to hear what other staff and students think about this one.