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David is lecturer in Philosophy, and sits on a number of college (finance, academic) and facaulty (IT) committees. He is responsible for keeping and eye on lecturer salaries and allowances at his college which creates quite a lot of administrative work. He has created a number of databases for the faculty in access which hold information about staff and graduates, however the databases do not link up or share information with any of the other university databases. David organises a lot of meeting via e-mail:

Papers and supporting papers for faculty meetings are now put onto weblearn to be accessed by staff which David sees as a "huge saving on wasted paper" and great for getting at "past things".

In terms of creating reading lists David perceives his simple word processed lists as "antique":

He sees bibliographic software as time-saving in the long term but time intesive to learn in the first place:

David spends about 50% of his time during term time teaching and preparing teaching resources for a range of philosophy modules including, Logic, History of Philosophy, Knowledge and Reality and Philosophy of Religion. He teaches using lectures and tutorials. He describes his lectures as low tech, "partly because of what’s available and partly because of what I’ve learnt to use". For the lectures he takes in the examination schools for large groups of students (300) he uses overhead projectors which he sees as "simply a substitute for writing things up on blackboards", but actually less interactive. He dislikes the set up at the examination schools because "the only way of making the stuff visible is having two independent overhead screens with overhead projectors showing the same stuff. And I have to run around putting stuff up and of course you can’t, er do anything dynamically on it". He would like to use power-point as for instance when demonstrating formal proofs (mathematical formulaes) he could show the proof appearing line by line and be more dynamic. Students have commented in lecture feedback that they would like more use of IT in their lectures but David comments that "there’s no point in learning to use it if you haven’t got the equipment to use it".

David produces handouts for his lectures and gives these to the students in class, he doesn't putt he handouts on weblearn: "I initially thought I’ll let them get the stuff from weblearn before coming to the lecture but then I knew half of them wouldn’t and if they didn’t they wouldn’t be able to follow it." David feels within lectures there is little room for discussion or debate, in many cases because the group was too large to do this effectively, or because the students were unresponsive:

Tutorial sessions are based around readings and the writing of essays. Nearly all tutorial sessions are 1:2 and students are never asked to work together or collaboratively with wider groups of students although David envisions that "Sometimes they do talk to each other about what they’re doing particularly if they’re in the same college", which he encourages. David describes the typical structure of the tutorial:

David considered face-to-face contact to affect a student’s motivation to learn in a positive manner:

David is not supportive of the idea of sharing student work because of the threat of a. plagiarism and b. that students may see work that is shared as model examples of what they should be producing which would not necessarily be the case.

Just over four years ago the ACDT helped David construct a series of online tutorials, formative assessments and a java tableau programme for supporting the Introduction to Logic course. The impetus for this project was an existing tableau programme that needed updating and replacing. The more he thought about how useful the programme would be the more he considered other material that would usefully support it (i.e. the tutorials and the assessments). The original problem of getting the difficult piece of programming done made David contact the ACDT for help who then also encouraged him to look more closely at the supporting materials. David as worried that students would not come to his lectures because most of the material was on the website but he has not found this to be the case as he finds that he can direct students from the lectures to the site if they are having difficulties.

In terms of receiving IT help his first port of call is the departmental IT staff, then the college ones. He also asks his son if he needs help.

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