Meeting Notes, 01 -11 (February 14 2011)

Present: Yoko Akama, Cathy Greenfield, Jeremy Parker, Karen Trist.

Update: Part As and program guides approved subject to some amendments, which Adrian is doing.
Communication Design has been tasked with developing an individual honours program, discussion about this and relation to Media and Communication honours is ongoing.

Old stuff: Have confirmed that the Part Bs of the course guides (where you pretty much specifically indicate what is being done in the subject) do not have a formal approval process. Have not been given any information about how the process of staffing and teaching the program will proceed.

We talked about developing and designing the entire curriculum, on a subject by subject basis. The first one we started with was the strategies come methods subject. We sent the day doing the first step, which was to make a list of the things we could think of that students might want or need to learn doing the subject. Each thing was stuck on to a chart, where I later moved the items into thematic/cognate groups.

Reading vertically, from left to right, headings are mine:

technical
does it need to cover how to write?
what ‘technical writing’ stuff is needed?
styleguide?
presmises of academic writing
library session

stuff
what stuff will you be working with? How?
where is this stuff?
what do you need to know to do this?

epistemologies of research
what is knowledge?
what is your discipline?
what counts as a proposition in your discipline?
what is a discipline?
what counts as professional knowledge in your field?
what is the difference between knowledge, information, data?

tacit knowing and research
what constitutes/counts as research?
what is a research question/problem?
what form does evidence take in your discipline?
what does a research answer look like?
what is an argument?

ethics
what are the ethics of research?
ethics – an ethical reflection of you to your research, your research persona as ethics, things you should do, not just things not to do

currently miscellaneous
how does this relate to the labs?
systems of reason
hierachies of knowledge
qualitative versus quantitative
specific methods or practice modules (interviewing, surveys), in lectures, workshops?

Next: from this map move to how students might learn these things, activities, methods, models. And then what learning outcomes these are, and what assessment artefacts are relevant and useful.

Presentation to School about Honours

Below is a pdf of the brief presentation to be made on February 14th about the new honours program. Since this is at a ‘whole school meeting’ it is a good opportunity to communicate to everyone what has happened, where we are up to, what is happening next, and keep information flowing. It also means if anyone feels like they want to have input, or find out more, there’s a face to things and an avenue opened for that.

• Get your copy of the Honours School Presentation (PDF)

Business Case

The business model come plan for the new honours has been formally approved. It loses money, but less than what we currently do, but I think with supervision as part of the mix it isn’t possible for an honours program to not lose money… Now we will wait and see what happens with the teaching and learning documents.