Information from a recent course on being a PhD supervisor, run by John Wakeford. Of the 1996-7 cohort of full-time PhD students (excluding those not upgraded from MPhil and those not continuing into the second year): 30-36% had a doctorate after four years 50-70% had a doctorate after five years 72% had a doctorate after […]
Notes on a seminar given by Keith Sawyer. Relevant literature includes: Paul Torrance 1960s-80s – concerned with both teaching and assessing creativity. Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) is still widely used in the US – primarily for admission into gifted and talented programmes. Howard Gardner 1970s – brought cognitive psychology to bear on creativity […]
Notes from a workshop on ‘Writing for peer-reviewed journals’ run by Pat Thomson. Reasons why reviewers and editors say they reject articles: Lack of focus – saying everything, focusing on nothing, cramming too much in one article Not locating the contribution and the position – for a particular audience, in relation to wider debates. the […]
(Originally from Tony Winefield, University of South Australia. Came to me via an OU research degree supervisor workshop.) Bad supervision, like any other skill can be acquired and developed with practice. Here are six simple rules to follow: Be inaccessible. Don’t return written work because you are ‘too busy’ to read it. Humiliate and belittle […]
Another set of notes from Handheld Learning finally making it into my blog. This is from a talk by James Clay. He argues that Twitter is about the community having coffee together and having a conversation. Like coffee-break chat, it’s a stream you dip into and it’s a leveller that can improve efficeincy within an […]
An exceedingly late write-up of a talk I went to on Moshi Monsters at Handheld Learning earlier this year. At that point, Moshi had seven million registered users and was adding over a million a month. About a third of these were based in the UK, a third in the US and a third in […]
I’ve spent the day looking at the impact factor of various journals. The ISI Web of Knowledge lists 1985 social science journals (according to a workshop I attended recently, only about 15% of education journals are in ISI). The ‘Annual Review of Psychology’ comes in top for 2008, with an annual impact factor of 16.217. […]