WS_30020(abertayjb)
So this is the 16th July, University of Abertay, talking to Jim. So we’re talking about teaching…
Hmmm hmm.
…pretty much in general, but it works better if we can situate it within the context of an actual module. So what I want you to do is have a think about a module or a teaching experience or something that really exemplifies your approach where your skill made a difference…
Hmmm hmm.
…or which, you know, showed your teacherly instincts, if you like.
Yeah, okay.
That was easy. ((laughs))
Yeah, well I mean, because I don’t do that much…
Right.
…it was quite clear which of the different modules to pick.
Okay. Good, so we’ll…
Yeah.
Which one was it?
Well it was the first term Project X module…
Okay, great.
…with the 60 nurses, ten of which were Mental Health counselling nurses, together with the Computing and Web Design ((0:01:06.4?)) mix of students…
Right. So we’ll…
…which is characteristic of my interdisciplinary life I suppose, that that would be the one that I think of the most, yeah.
And that was… okay, so that’s the one we’ll…
Yeah, yeah.
…((0:01:19.4?)) everything in and we’ll talk about that. So, having fixed on that…
Hmmm hmm.
…let’s go back a bit. And so, just very general stuff, how long have you been teaching? And that’s anything, not just in university or…
The first teaching I did was immediately after my Honours year in 1996, so academic session ’96-’97. I’d finished and I was invited to stay on to do a research assistantship and obviously, with a family, that doesn’t pay too well. So they offered me part-time teaching as well.
Oh, okay.
So…
So you had two jobs?
Yeah.
Okay.
Well I’ve often had two jobs. I had three jobs during my PhD, PhD part-time ((0:02:02.4?)) and something else. And so for that first year I supported a member of staff that I’d worked with very closely in my Honours project and in other coursework as well in the previous year. I was actually teaching year four, lab support.
Which you’d just left?
Which I’d just left, yes, for Human Computer Interaction, together with some second year C++ programming.
So this was very much in the context of another single person’s work, that you were just supporting that one person?
Oh yes, I wasn’t leading this in any way.
Right, but it was also one person, it wasn’t…
It was two different staffs, so fourth year ones were one staff, the second year one was with another member of staff.
Right.
So I got a little bit of breadth, and certainly the member of staff was, with the fourth year module, trying to expose me to the process behind the scenes, because that made it clear to him that this was my sort of ‘toe in the water’ did I want to do this or not? And so I then understood a little bit about the planning and preparation and the marking and the follow-on activities that were associated with teaching a module.
So he kind of made sure you’d had the whole life cycle.
Yes. So I didn’t do it, but I was made aware of it.
Right.
I then did my PhD from late ’96 right through ‘til ’99-2000, where I was running two modules a year.
Right, and they were your own modules?
My own modules.
Right.
And I had a year tutor role as well at that point as well.
So that’s pastoral care?
Yes, yeah. Responsibility for generating timetables for cohorts, dealing with issues in the first instance before referring them to the associate programme tutor.
Yeah.
And that was the full lifecycle. So actually from a very early stage… so they were small modules, they were on an HND, they were in stuff that I knew a lot about; one of them was Assembly Language Programming and the other one was Operating Systems. I was very comfortable with the material, but it was writing lectures, doing labs, marking the stuff, right from first year PhD.
Right, and they just said, “Here you are, this is for you,”?
Pretty much. Well, because of the performance that I’d demonstrated in the previous year.
Right, so that was atypical of… so other PhD students wouldn’t have got that learning that early?
No, I wouldn’t have thought so.
No, okay.
I haven’t seen it since.
Okay. ((0:04:29.6?))
Yeah. So I was doing something right. ((laughs))
((laughs))
‘Cause I got to do it again the next year, so they…
So it must’ve been okay, yeah. ((laughs))
Yeah.
Okay, so talking about the project, I mean the project module, so how long have you been teaching project worker stuff?
That started a lot later. There’s actually some comfort in teaching things that are much more structured and have a heavy content basis, ‘cause you can just teach the content and the rest of it’ll happen. So I done a lectureship in 2000, late ’99, early 2000, I can’t remember exactly. And it must’ve been three or four years where I was allowed to develop my research agenda and I was kept pretty much teaching the same stuff, which was great. It let me just get my head properly on top of the rest of the job. At that point Geoff Lund decided he didn’t want to do the first year programming any more, so that must have been 2004-2005, so I took that on, and I also started looking at… well I started supervising the Honours projects, which was my sort of toe into project work. Two years later Geoff asked me to run the fourth year Honours project modules, all four of them, so the project planning, the projects themselves and the evaluation, because it makes sense that somebody that’s already supervising PhD students and is writing and having assessed project proposals and is living in that world of grant writing, it makes sense that they bring some of that expertise to at least the final year projects. So whilst I was struggling in terms of maintaining… because I had 26 Honours project students that year…
That’s a lot.
…I had some technical knowledge to help some of them but that was not the role, it was more a project management role because I was doing that already, and that represented the bulk of my teaching, together with the first year programming. So that was my first foray into projects.
Okay. And then what was the first time you taught this module?
The first time I taught this module was this year.
Okay.
Yeah. The member of staff that was doing it didn’t want to do it any more.
Right.
It didn’t have a brilliant track record.
Right.
Never one to shie away from a challenge, I said, “I’ll do it.”
Okay.
In exchange for the Introductory Programming.
Ah.
Because we had a member of staff join us that was probably better at teaching it than I was. She did it two years ago but then was on maternity leave, I did it as a temporary, and then sort of gave it back again for the last session, which was always the plan, you know, for lots of reasons able to bring much more enthusiasm, etc, etc, so I switched into the Project X modules which seen as particularly… they were seen as a very good idea but particularly problematic.
So give me a bit of the back story: give me a bit of the history.
The history about this came… and it’s actually linked in to some of the research activity here. Abertay is trying to develop interdisciplinary research at its staff level, and so it made sense if we’re trying to sell ourselves as distinctive on that side, well why don’t we try and do something distinctive in the lower years. And you’ll see from Mary Malcolm’s ‘graduate attributes’ that interdisciplinary working is one of those things.
Oh, really.
And particularly for Computing students; they need to recognise that because we’re not doing computer sites, we’re doing application development. We’re not living in a vacuum here, these guys are going to work with clients in industry on the main specific problems; it’s not, you know, they’re not going to write compilers or whatever, that’s not what training needs to do. So it’s of use to the students as well to start to think of the world around them in a systems way, and all my research is about systems thinking, be it plants, fungi, spread of disease in a hospital, whatever, whatever, it’s all the same. So I was naturally interested in trying to promote that way of thinking in these students. My research interests have increasingly drifted into Healthcare, so I’ve got a project to do with the spread of MRSA and a larger focus on cancer work, and so it made sense that, of all the people you could look at, the person to teach the module that was 50% Computing and 50% Nursing would be me.
So it had run before though? So what was…?
It had run three years before.
Okay.
No, two years before, yeah.
Okay. And…
A lot of the students couldn’t see the point in why they were doing this.
Right. So it had a bad reputation with the students?
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah. They didn’t like the way it was taught, they couldn’t see the relevance of it. Their coursework’s related to generic skills, so they were asked to design a concept for something in the Leisure industry, that might make money, for example. In contrast I asked them to look at smart hospitals using RFID tags. They gave the students something to buy in to; they became all of a sudden elevated to notional experts because they knew a little bit about hospitals and how they worked. The Computing students became then relative experts in RFID tags because they have an interest in them, and if you explain it’s just a bar code you don’t have to look at, and you can see it without looking at it, then, you know, radio bar code, anybody can understand that. And I made it very clear to them that they only had to understand RFIDs to the same extent that they understand a mobile phone. “You know how to work a mobile phone?” “Yeah.” “Right, who knows how it works?” Nobody knows how it works, yeah? You don’t need to, that’s the point. So it’s a very phenomenological level of understanding, but I was able to… I felt I was able to ground it in the world that they knew because it was a world that I knew. And, more than that, I was able to give it credence because I could say, “Look, this is the world that I live in. I am at the interface between Healthcare and Computing, it’s real.” I also brought in a couple… well one guest speaker – there was meant to be two, one fell through – a guest speaker who wrote the Patient Admission System for local hospitals, and she talked through the patient as part of a system. So they were getting it from reality as well. And so that meant that the students bought into it more because they could see what it was about.
Sure.
Yeah.
So who… the design before you came in…
Hmmm hmm.
I mean I can clearly see why people thought it was a good idea.
Yeah.
But…
Okay. The concept came from a former colleague of mine – who’s now left us for bigger things – who had a brilliant idea and not enough time to bring it to its fullest fruition, and actually, to be honest, probably not that much teaching experience either in terms of how to make an idea reach students.
Right.
So it was his concept but it was then paired with another member of staff who was not working in that area, and that member of staff then, because of lack of availability to become the brunt of contact time, and so it lost its sense of grounding and context.
Okay. So we need to… I mean how much of that, of the original stuff, did you inherit and how much did you just throw it out and start again?
I took the initial case study which ran for… it used to run for quite a lot of the term previously, most of the term actually, because it’s a case study about “Vicky, the Killer Ventilator” and they get eight news articles where a story unfolds, and you’ve got to unpick the morals of it, who did what, ((0:13:11.9?)). And that ran for quite a lot of the term, together with a problem-solving game where you had to use teamwork to complete puzzles and the like. And the problem with that was that the interface was a bit dated, so the Computing students laughed at it but could do it.
Ah, okay.
The Nursing students just didn’t get it because that’s not the world that they live in – they’re not interested in computer games. Don’t publish the bit about laughing because that’s probably libellous – is the company involved, no. ((laughs)) You get the general sense that it wasn’t quite appropriate.
Yeah, yeah.
And so I took the case study and condensed it down and gave it out much quicker with a bit of a story as to what was going on, so help them through it more.
Yeah, okay.
And it was only to get them to talk.
Yeah, sure.
And then, the previous years, all the Nursing students did was this “Vicky the Ventilator” study and the game.
Oh.
And then the Mental Health students that were involved in the second term – because the nurses could go and do something else, they’d go and do the placements – did the interesting bit, which was coming up with an idea and working it through and then selling it as a pitched presentation. So I brought that into term one so everybody could do it because I felt that was the most valuable bit.
Right, okay.
I got rid of the game, shrunk the Ventilator thing down, and actually spent the first three weeks playing games with them.
What sort of games?
I’d been to the Crucible, ((Nestor’s)) Crucible which was a lot of ice-breaking sessions in that, so things along those lines just to try… because it was… in the first week all the Computing students on one side, all of the nurses on the other side. There’s the bamboo lifting game – I don’t know if you know… you hold two fingers out with ten people and you put the bamboo on it and it naturally goes up because of the sort of tensions in your fingers, and you’ve got to try and lower it to the ground.