Simon’s Physics Education Blog

Notes taken from TLA Colloquim on preparing Tutors and Demonstrators for their teaching and academic roles at University, 19th June 2006.
Michelle Marincovich, director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Stanford

Outlined Stanford model of requirement to train TAs in general pedagogy (done centrally) and preparing to teach in their discipline (subject based, conceptual problems, [...]

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One of the things we are instigating for next year is a training course specifically for our PGs who will teach in in our early years (1 and 2) workshops.
Have been giving some thought to how this will look to get the right balance of generic material about teaching and Physocs-specific material. More on that [...]

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A colleague of mine often responds to discussions of the benefits of e-learning to students with the comment:
“ … but how can you show quantitatively that it does any good? “
It’s a fair question and one that I have found myself struggling to answer in the past. There’s a number of inherent problems with trying to [...]

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Came across this great quote on Tama’s eLearning blog talking about Stanford on iTunes:
 ”professional obligation of educators to embrace podcasting and use its disruptive potential for constructive opportunities.”
I have been toying with the idea of incorporating podcasts as additional learning resources in a large first year undergraduate Physics course I am course organiser for. But not, as an example, just [...]

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So what do you call a b log entry written on the move …? An m-blog…. I am suresomeone knows.
Well, just because I can, I thought I would give this a go. Currently on a train just outside Newcastle….but the power socket under my chair which allegedly gives my machine juice is refusing to give me [...]

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I am in the middle (well, not true actually… at the start of) writing an article on the use of electronic voting systems for use in large undergraduate lectures. There’s a ton of stuff out there at the moment about the application of this type of technique in HE.
Steve Draper’s page has a ton of [...]

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So why did I bother starting this blog?
Well, for a start, I have a web page that is massively out of date that I just never seem to get arond to updating these days. So eventually, this might just supercede this…. who knows…
If you want to see just how bad that is, you can find [...]

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I am a Senior Lecturer in the School of Physics at the University in Edinburgh. I teach a large first year undergraduate course, the development of which is one of the main reasons for wanting to create this blog.

I am getting slightly better pictures taken as time goes on (matter of opinion: this one has [...]

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