For Students
How to be successful as a college student
-
Ssshhh!!! Exams in Progress!
This is a quiet but busy time in National College of Ireland semester one exams are now in progress. We are encouraged to keep as quiet as possible as each room on the campus is now used to its fullest extent to facilitate the process. There is always tension associated with exams. Students of all ages and all backgrounds find the prospect of being tested daunting. This is very understandable we live in a culture of measurement and accountability and education is an expensive process. So, especially for the self-motivated, we all want to see how much we know and how well we have progressed. As discussed previously, there is…
You May Also Like
Getting to Grips with Academic Writing
-
What are New Year’s resolutions and why they seldom work
New Year’s Celebration fireworks at Carton House, Maynooth Happy New Year! It’s the start of 2011 and last night we celebrated as we said goodbye to 2010 and welcomed the turn over to a New Year. At New Year and perhaps birthdays or other recurring significant dates we often conduct a self-appraisal and make decisions about our future behaviour. This is typically framed as a New Year’s Resolution: I will go to the gym and loose weight;I will give up smoking;I will do a course;I will complete an unfinished project (I know someone who has resolved to complete her master’s dissertation). So what’s really happening–why do we make such self-resolutions? …
You May Also Like
Getting to Grips with Academic Writing
-
Learning without Teachers
I met Sugata Mitra at On-Line Educa in Berlin two years ago and was very impressed by his research work and his thinking on how children learn. This most recent presentation at the TED conference opens up a timely debate on the role of instruction in education.It is easy to be sceptical about the findings from his research. One could argue that such insights are gleaned from very particular contexts and further investigation of the actual learning processes involved is necessary. However, I am not really surprised that these effects are in evidence and they are compatible with the work of other educationalists such as Dewey, Vygotsky and Bruner.Have a…
You May Also Like
Getting to Grips with Academic Writing
-
Wikipedia as a source in academic writing
Have you ever heard of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi?Pestalozzi was a Swiss educationalist – he had interesting ideas for progressive education – at the start of the nineteenth century he was advocating an enlightened approach to schooling. Perhaps in a future blog I will further discuss Pestalozzi but the topic I have set out above is Wikipedia and I have introduced Pestalozzi as an example to support a point I wish to make.Could I invite you the reader to open a new tab and look up Pestalozzi in Wikipedia. There you will find an excellent illustrated article containing biographical details and illustrations. It is a good place to start if you…
You May Also Like
Getting to Grips with Academic Writing
-
Course Entry Requirements – Recognising Learning from Experience
If you are thinking about taking a course, for example any of the NCI courses in the prospectus, you may see in the entry requirements that it is necessary for students to have a specific level of degree (e.g. honours degree) or a certificate or diploma to gain entry. These conditions are necessary so that all students are able to participate effectively and teaching staff can make certain assumptions about the level of prior knowledge people will have. However, there is a down side to this in that sometimes very good potential students miss out because on paper they are not deemed to meet the entry level requirements.We’ve all come…
You May Also Like
Getting to Grips with Academic Writing
-
Plagiarism Reframed
Mention plagiarism to any third level academic and you are likely to be greeted with groans and laments.This is one topic that gets into people’s hearts – it leads to animated discussions and hard views. It is unwise to be regarded as soft on the issue. It is annoying, very annoying to be reading something presented as a student’s original work when it dawns on you – this is familiar – or – this is not the same style of writing as expected.Plagiarism is genuinely offensive to many academics – it offends one’s sense of academic integrity and is regarded as a dishonourable practice and a form of cheating.Many also…
You May Also Like
Getting to Grips with Academic Writing
-
Learning Assessment Through Life
I attended an excellent workshop today on the topic of assessment and learning. The workshop was delivered by Professor Sally Brown of Leeds Metropolitan University in the UK. The attendees consisted of a mix of our own faculty at National College of Ireland and teachers from some of the other colleges around the country as part of the Learning Innovation Network. Sally started by inviting participants to reflect on how learning assessments have impacted on all our lives.This exercise got me thinking about the idea of a lifespan perspective on assessment – key moments of assessment and how significant their influence can be.When I was in school we were streamed…
You May Also Like
Getting to Grips with Academic Writing
-
Adult Learning
Adults learn what they want to learn and what they perceive as useful to them;Internalisation involves the construction of new meaning based on passed experience and new stimuli;Learning can be understood as always involving cognitive, psychodynamic and societal/social aspects;Communities of practice embody all three of these aspects and as such are powerful drivers for adult learning;Engagement in critical discourse is a likely outcome of successful adult learning in the long-term the reverse is also true adult learning is the inevitable outcome of critical discourse.Transformative learning can arise in adults where appropriate conditions exist for questioning assumptions, critical discourse, reflection and restructuring of perspectives. posted by Leo Casey
You May Also Like
Getting to Grips with Academic Writing