What, no slides? – Weeknote #122 – 2nd July 2021

raining
Image by Roman Grac from Pixabay

Monday I was planning to head into the office, but with the rain coming down and a risk of thunderstorms, I decided to work from home. I do like going into the office, but without the discipline of formal in-person meetings, the incentive isn’t really there. I am trying to go in about twice a week, but at least one. I do like the change in routine and scenery and that I think is what is important.

Started to plan a presentation that I am delivering on Wednesday, but in the end decided that I would deliver it without slides. Not that I don’t like using slides, I think in the context of online conferences, that sometimes a no slide approach is different to what others are doing so adds variety to the online format.

Wednesday I was again delivering a session of an online Digital Leadership programme to a cohort of university staff. It went well, but was clear somethings work well online and somethings didn’t.

Later that day I delivered a presentation at the Active Blended Learning Conference 2021.

Moving from Translation to Transformation

One of the things we have noticed back in March 2020 as the education sector moved rapidly to remote delivery was the different models that people used. However what we did see was many people were merely translating their usual practice to an online version. David White writing about his experiences at UAL, called it practice mirroring. “So in the move to online teaching our initial instinct is to preserve Contact Hours by mirroring what would have been face-to-face sessions with webinar style sessions. What this looks like is exhausting 3-4 hour online sessions which must be almost impossible to stay engaged with.” We have been interviewing students and staff about their experiences across the pandemic and what practices have worked and what hasn’t worked. As part of Jisc’s work in looking at the challenges in delivering teaching remotely during this crisis period we have been reflecting on how teaching staff can translate their existing practice into new models of delivery that could result in better learning, but also have less of detrimental impact on staff and students. In this session James will describe how many universities who translated their practice are now reflecting on how they can transform their practice to enable an enhanced approach to digital teaching and learning.

I decided not to use any slides, and just talk to the screen.

Though I think I might have spoken a little too fast.

Later I was involved in a marketing strategy meeting.

On Thursday I had planned to go to the office, but due to the need to collect something, and the fact that I had no in-person meetings, decided to work from home instead.

Friday I was again delivering a session of an online Digital Leadership programme to a cohort of university staff. It was a repeat of Wednesday, the exercise that didn’t work well on that day I removed for Friday’s session.

My top tweet this week was this one.

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