Good Practice Blog

Today I want to talk mashing: mainly mash-ups to be precise. There are a couple definitions. Well, probably lots of different ones. Essentially, you take two different (almost paradoxically different things) and mesh them together to form one never-before-thought-about unique creation! Da daaaa! Increasingly this is being done with software (if this hurts your brain, [...]

The University of Sheffield has been increasingly YouTubing it over the past year. Many of you will be aware of the “Dream Bigger Dreams” video and campaign. This is the “official” video:

There are videos that the University has asked students to make about their experiences here. One of the most recent was the “Sheffield Made [...]

Have been putting off this post waaaaaaaaaaaaay too long. But it’s a short one and I think it is of interest for many of you. It was at least for me.
What is synoptic assessment? As I understand it, it combines assessments over modules and across subjects. It expects students to transfer knowledge and skills and [...]

I began yesterday musing upon the underlying assumptions about the Ivory Tower metaphor: that universities and those who “reside within” are somehow passive, locked away and introverted and that this is a space available to only a chosen few. Perhaps this makes sense as university education was seen, until very recently, as something that a [...]

This is a continuation of yesterday’s post discussing emotional labour in universities and how the administrative workload for academics has increased in the past decade.
For some, developing administrative skills as an academic means re-adjusting overall job expectations which is an emotional skill in itself. Much of the research in the area of emotional labour [...]