The day started off with a talk about how to be better teachers, and keep our students engaged. I quite liked the quote by Henri Poincaré that was mentioned: “Science is built up of facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones a house.” It really made me think about a number of the lectures I’ve been to, where someone just chucked info at me with no context and thought they were conveying their material, when in actuality they either conveyed confusion of boredom, as I had no idea what they were saying. Later we discussed the nuances between Research Led Learning and Research Based Learning, which had particular relevance to me, as UCL’s new provost is enacting this change University-wise, and I’ll be feeling the effects of this difference soon (as it’s rolled out to all the departments). The last speaker for the morning impressed upon the group the importance for standards and literacy (in a broader sense) to effectively engage students and showed examples of how this was implemented in her organisation.

The afternoon was quite interesting; we broke off into smaller groups, arranged today by topic (my group had a heavy interdisciplinary slant) to discuss the individual projects we were hoping to work on during the workshop. It seemed we were all initially hinting at problems associated with interdisciplinary programmes, so I presented my work on common challenges and suggested solutions in interdisciplinary research. The ideas seemed to be well received and address a number of issues the various group members faced, hopefully helping some of them better structure the activity they’re going to work on by taking into account the things they can do to handle problems before they happen. For my own project, I’m largely building off of what I’d already begun to structure earlier, but have some new ideas, as we’ve also been asked to think about how we can make this activity extensible and deployable in a wider context. If I can set up instructions on using arcgis.com, launching a Story Map, and how to gather/load data, then the tech for the activity is as good as done and I can begin thinking about context issues a bit more. To tie back to the quote by Poincaré, the tech for this solution could be considered the skeleton for the house and the context the rest of the construction materials; however, as of right now, they’re all in piles awaiting assembly.