Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Online Conferences
I have been participating in an big international conference on assessment organized by REAP. Derry drew my attention to it. The conference was entirely online. So far, I think the pros and cons of online conferring are:
1. Contributions like keynotes and intros are mercifully short and to the point, because they are usually in document form (there has been one rather flashy webcast)
2. All the main contributions and all the participants' contributions as well have been archived for further reference.
3. Although the chat sessions are in real time, everything else can be downloaded and read at suitable times -- for Australians and for British night owls like me, that means well after midnight BST.
4. I like being fairly anonymous when I chat. I have an online identity and that can be handy if you are old, ugly or notorious for writing spiky stuff on distance education.
5. I can go to an international conference with no travel and no personal costs. I can log in at College, at home or in any Internet Cafe. If I had a laptop I could log in on the bus!
There just are no cons from what I can see. One thing about online chat though...it is different from face-to-face (f2f) in several ways. For one thing, responses are sometimes interrupted by other questions or responses, which can make it fun to work out who is actually replying to whom. Moderators do their best, but it really is pretty unconstrained discussion. I found people dying to get in, not waiting for replies, having little side chats -- the very opposite of f2f seminars. In fact it almost made you long for the nasty regulating side of f2f where you can quell interruptions with a nasty scowl or a derisive sniff. I am sure new textual regulators will evolve.
The chat was followed by asynchronous discussion on a bulletin board (forum) thing so anyone who felt edged out could still have their say, and references and links and other things unsuitable for actual chat could be posted.
Very useful and productive.
Dave Harris
1. Contributions like keynotes and intros are mercifully short and to the point, because they are usually in document form (there has been one rather flashy webcast)
2. All the main contributions and all the participants' contributions as well have been archived for further reference.
3. Although the chat sessions are in real time, everything else can be downloaded and read at suitable times -- for Australians and for British night owls like me, that means well after midnight BST.
4. I like being fairly anonymous when I chat. I have an online identity and that can be handy if you are old, ugly or notorious for writing spiky stuff on distance education.
5. I can go to an international conference with no travel and no personal costs. I can log in at College, at home or in any Internet Cafe. If I had a laptop I could log in on the bus!
There just are no cons from what I can see. One thing about online chat though...it is different from face-to-face (f2f) in several ways. For one thing, responses are sometimes interrupted by other questions or responses, which can make it fun to work out who is actually replying to whom. Moderators do their best, but it really is pretty unconstrained discussion. I found people dying to get in, not waiting for replies, having little side chats -- the very opposite of f2f seminars. In fact it almost made you long for the nasty regulating side of f2f where you can quell interruptions with a nasty scowl or a derisive sniff. I am sure new textual regulators will evolve.
The chat was followed by asynchronous discussion on a bulletin board (forum) thing so anyone who felt edged out could still have their say, and references and links and other things unsuitable for actual chat could be posted.
Very useful and productive.
Dave Harris
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Tag rugby festival benefits children
A massive exercise is underway at the College to prepare for the arrival of hundreds of children who are taking part in a tag rugby festival. This annual event will bring together youngsters from 72 West Devon Primary schools for a day-long knockout competition on 25 May.
This is the 16th year Marjon has hosted the event and staff are now well rehearsed in the logistics of co-ordinating 72 teams playing on 12 specially marked out rugby pitches in the college grounds.
The Marjon event is co-ordinated by Linzi Tynan, the Sports Centre Manager, with help from Diane Smith the Sports Centre Administrator and Mike Carpenter from Sir John Hunt School Sport Coordinators. The order for the day is to have fun and good sportsmanship is actively encouraged among the teams; bad play is not tolerated. Referees are equally provided from Marjon students and the local police.
Each participating school is asked to raise at least £25 from a sponsored rugby event for the Child Victims of Crime (CVC), the registered charity of the Great Britain Police Rugby Section. Last Year £988 was raised for this worthwhile charity. Volunteers from the police force are taught how to coach the tag teams to participate in the regional and national competitions, helping forge good relationships with the schools and their pupils. CVC provide a trophy and medals for the festival and also pay for the winners to attend a national final at Rugby School.
Registration for the event starts at 9.l5am, with the first games kicking off at 10.00. The finals begin at about 3.30pm.
Diane Smith
School Administrator
School of Sports PE & Leisure/Sports Centre
This is the 16th year Marjon has hosted the event and staff are now well rehearsed in the logistics of co-ordinating 72 teams playing on 12 specially marked out rugby pitches in the college grounds.
The Marjon event is co-ordinated by Linzi Tynan, the Sports Centre Manager, with help from Diane Smith the Sports Centre Administrator and Mike Carpenter from Sir John Hunt School Sport Coordinators. The order for the day is to have fun and good sportsmanship is actively encouraged among the teams; bad play is not tolerated. Referees are equally provided from Marjon students and the local police.
Each participating school is asked to raise at least £25 from a sponsored rugby event for the Child Victims of Crime (CVC), the registered charity of the Great Britain Police Rugby Section. Last Year £988 was raised for this worthwhile charity. Volunteers from the police force are taught how to coach the tag teams to participate in the regional and national competitions, helping forge good relationships with the schools and their pupils. CVC provide a trophy and medals for the festival and also pay for the winners to attend a national final at Rugby School.
Registration for the event starts at 9.l5am, with the first games kicking off at 10.00. The finals begin at about 3.30pm.
Diane Smith
School Administrator
School of Sports PE & Leisure/Sports Centre
Friday, May 11, 2007
Conference on Public Health
Conference Title:-
Peninsula Teaching Public Health Network Learning Event
Date:-
29th March 2007 – Plymouth
In attendance:-
Phil Barter and Melissa Coyle, SSPEL, Marjon
Phil Barter and Melissa Coyle recently attended a conference on public health. It was an opportunity to ‘network’ with the elite health workers in the peninsula area. The presenters included John Richards CEO Plymouth teaching PCT and Lindsey Hayes from the Royal College of Nursing delivering the most recent information in public health.
John Richards delivered a presentation of how much the PCT had changed and was going to change. He highlighted that education was key to this process and events like this enhanced that view. John stressed the importance of everyone working together to achieve common goals. Lindsey Hayes delivered a fantastic presentation on how health should be about the whole person and not just the physical nature of today’s public health. The importance of nursing was obviously a constant throughout the presentation but this emphasised the message about getting the balance right between the social, physical and mental wellbeing of the patient.
Kevin Ellison (Plymouth teaching PCT consultant) presented the changing face of public health in terms of pay structure and how it was now possible to earn a good wage through the non medical posts. He had produced a diagram on how you could progress through from any level and end up at the top CEO position. The only disappointing aspect to his presentation was the absence of Marjon as an education provider in the South West in this discipline.
The afternoon sessions involved an interactive quiz delivered by Paul Brown (Peak Performance) that everyone in the room had to take part in. The quiz was an opportunity for delegates to have their input on a variety of topics from the direction of public health to what was more important, the person who invented the sewage system or the person who discovered penicillin.
Overall it was an informative event about the local PCT and an opportunity to meet a lot of the key providers in the area which could influence the future development of SSPEL programmes, in particular HEPA.
Phil Barter
Lecturer in ASC & HEPA
Peninsula Teaching Public Health Network Learning Event
Date:-
29th March 2007 – Plymouth
In attendance:-
Phil Barter and Melissa Coyle, SSPEL, Marjon
Phil Barter and Melissa Coyle recently attended a conference on public health. It was an opportunity to ‘network’ with the elite health workers in the peninsula area. The presenters included John Richards CEO Plymouth teaching PCT and Lindsey Hayes from the Royal College of Nursing delivering the most recent information in public health.
John Richards delivered a presentation of how much the PCT had changed and was going to change. He highlighted that education was key to this process and events like this enhanced that view. John stressed the importance of everyone working together to achieve common goals. Lindsey Hayes delivered a fantastic presentation on how health should be about the whole person and not just the physical nature of today’s public health. The importance of nursing was obviously a constant throughout the presentation but this emphasised the message about getting the balance right between the social, physical and mental wellbeing of the patient.
Kevin Ellison (Plymouth teaching PCT consultant) presented the changing face of public health in terms of pay structure and how it was now possible to earn a good wage through the non medical posts. He had produced a diagram on how you could progress through from any level and end up at the top CEO position. The only disappointing aspect to his presentation was the absence of Marjon as an education provider in the South West in this discipline.
The afternoon sessions involved an interactive quiz delivered by Paul Brown (Peak Performance) that everyone in the room had to take part in. The quiz was an opportunity for delegates to have their input on a variety of topics from the direction of public health to what was more important, the person who invented the sewage system or the person who discovered penicillin.
Overall it was an informative event about the local PCT and an opportunity to meet a lot of the key providers in the area which could influence the future development of SSPEL programmes, in particular HEPA.
Phil Barter
Lecturer in ASC & HEPA
Thursday, May 03, 2007
An unintentional journey: reflecting on a research pathway
There is perhaps, nothing new in the observation that the most stimulating and rewarding research activities are frequently those arrived at accidentally. It was during preparation for a lecture on the ‘mainstreaming’ of disability sport, in spring 2005, that I stumbled across a rich vein of information on the use of physical activity by international NGOs, to assist rehabilitation of amputees in post-conflict situations. This led to preliminary research that rapidly confirmed the potential for me to synthesise my interest in the relationship between physical activity and human development, with my previous research concerning foreign policy discourses as they relate to international sport.
My journey over the past two years has resulted in engagement with the development community through a range of conference experiences and face to face meetings. I was invited to join UKIDSA (UK International Development through Sport Alliance) Wider Reference Group in January 2006. My conference programme has included:
September 2005: European Association of Sports Management conference in Gateshead. Made contact with UK Sport international development officers. I presented a conference paper entitled: Sport and Development Assistance – Extending the boundaries of international aid,
December 2005: United Nations conference on Sport and Development in Magglingen, Switzerland. This offered the opportunity to network with representatives from a range of sports organisations engaged in international development programmes.
September 2006: British Society of Sports Historians conference in Lancaster. My decision to adopt an historical approach to my research resulted in my delivery of a conference paper entitled: Whose Burden, Whose Benefit? Sport development assistance in colonial and post-colonial contexts.
November 2006: Development Studies Association conference in Reading. Opportunity to network with a range of people from the international development community. The theme of the conference was the private sector in development. I presented a conference paper entitled: Private Motive, Public Good - Sports organisations and the international development agenda.
March 2007: International Studies Association conference in Chicago (Illinois) Part sponsored by UK Sport International Development department. I was involved in the organisation of two Panels on sport and development assistance. I presented a conference paper entitled Disability Sport and the Politics of Development.
My first published paper from this programme of research is entitled ‘A Question of Motives: Reciprocity, Sport and Development Assistance. It appears in the March 2007 edition of the Routledge journal European Sports Management Quarterly. A second, using the title from my September 2006 conference paper, has been submitted for consideration to the Routledge journal Sport in History. I am currently working on a third journal article, for submission to a journal dealing with disability and development, in the early summer. I was involved in the submission to Palgrave in December, of a proposal for a joint edited book on sport and development. We were delighted to receive a contract offer for the book on 25th April. The target for submission of the manuscript is spring 2008.
In-house journal
My research over the past two years has caused me to re-visit the issue of conducting inter-disciplinary investigations. This has informed our proposal to launch our in-house inter-disciplinary journal Physical Activity and Human Development in the summer of this year. Our Dean of School Sam Peach has been very supportive of this initiative and I am currently working with my colleague David Harris to prepare the framework for the journal. Colleagues across the School have been contributing enthusiastically to this project.
The Promising Researcher scheme has certainly provided valuable assistance for this programme of research. Most importantly, it has acted as a focal point and catalyst for engaging in the research process. My thanks to all involved in supporting me through this scheme.
Aaron Beacom
My journey over the past two years has resulted in engagement with the development community through a range of conference experiences and face to face meetings. I was invited to join UKIDSA (UK International Development through Sport Alliance) Wider Reference Group in January 2006. My conference programme has included:
September 2005: European Association of Sports Management conference in Gateshead. Made contact with UK Sport international development officers. I presented a conference paper entitled: Sport and Development Assistance – Extending the boundaries of international aid,
December 2005: United Nations conference on Sport and Development in Magglingen, Switzerland. This offered the opportunity to network with representatives from a range of sports organisations engaged in international development programmes.
September 2006: British Society of Sports Historians conference in Lancaster. My decision to adopt an historical approach to my research resulted in my delivery of a conference paper entitled: Whose Burden, Whose Benefit? Sport development assistance in colonial and post-colonial contexts.
November 2006: Development Studies Association conference in Reading. Opportunity to network with a range of people from the international development community. The theme of the conference was the private sector in development. I presented a conference paper entitled: Private Motive, Public Good - Sports organisations and the international development agenda.
March 2007: International Studies Association conference in Chicago (Illinois) Part sponsored by UK Sport International Development department. I was involved in the organisation of two Panels on sport and development assistance. I presented a conference paper entitled Disability Sport and the Politics of Development.
My first published paper from this programme of research is entitled ‘A Question of Motives: Reciprocity, Sport and Development Assistance. It appears in the March 2007 edition of the Routledge journal European Sports Management Quarterly. A second, using the title from my September 2006 conference paper, has been submitted for consideration to the Routledge journal Sport in History. I am currently working on a third journal article, for submission to a journal dealing with disability and development, in the early summer. I was involved in the submission to Palgrave in December, of a proposal for a joint edited book on sport and development. We were delighted to receive a contract offer for the book on 25th April. The target for submission of the manuscript is spring 2008.
In-house journal
My research over the past two years has caused me to re-visit the issue of conducting inter-disciplinary investigations. This has informed our proposal to launch our in-house inter-disciplinary journal Physical Activity and Human Development in the summer of this year. Our Dean of School Sam Peach has been very supportive of this initiative and I am currently working with my colleague David Harris to prepare the framework for the journal. Colleagues across the School have been contributing enthusiastically to this project.
The Promising Researcher scheme has certainly provided valuable assistance for this programme of research. Most importantly, it has acted as a focal point and catalyst for engaging in the research process. My thanks to all involved in supporting me through this scheme.
Aaron Beacom
