Education & Student

The ideas I presented from my “Small Changes Big Difference” project in the Sociology department were received with interest at this session. The attendees were keen to offer their own experiences and opinions about my ideas.

We spoke a lot about blogs in particular. An interesting idea that I hadn’t considered before was suggested: maybe blogs have gone out of fashion in favour of applications such as Facebook and Twitter. There were a number of people who saw blogs as too complicated and time-consuming. Also it was mentioned that students might see blogs as too official to write their thoughts on, they might believe they are being assessed.

There was some disagreement as to what a blog actually is, with some seeing it as more of a personal diary and others as a collaborative tool. It was also expressed that staff find it frustrating when they give students detailed resource packs and students ask obvious questions anyway. We thought it would be good if MOLE had some kind of search tool on it for easier access to relevant information.

In terms of reading groups we spoke about how students can often find it easier to talk to other students about things they don’t understand as they speak the same “jargon”. There was a lady from the library who was particularly interested in this session as she is looking at connecting university students and sixth form students and some of the ideas covered this area.

After the session I spoke to a gentleman from Manchester University and he said he was really enjoying the whole day and he couldn’t believe that CILASS didn’t have full funding for next year as it obviously does such good work!!

Source: Su Arnall