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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: 

  I mean it was impossible before email, but even with email they way it works is the way most of us do it though I know there are better systems is by emailing everyone and saying, “Look I can manage the following times, let me know which of those times are possible, impossible or best for you.” and you wait and you get it back and not everyone can do it and so you try again.


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": 


  If I were beginning and could re-do them all and had some time I would go about them in a much better way. I mean that, that um I think one can produce them so that they’ve got links on them and the links take you to the library. 


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


  [C]ertainly time saving, yeah. No I mean that’s just one effort, one, I should have discovered that. I mean actually it’s perfectly true that the sorts of things I do tend not to have very huge lists of um citations anyway so I mean I might er if I had to produce the length of, of um references that some people do for articles I um I might do things differently. But otherwise I just do the slog of um, often what one does of course is to copy the citation that someone else has used in their, their bibliography which is probably where you found it in the first place. The only problem being, of course, there are one or two different standard styles and if you’re looking at oldish books they don’t, seem to have rather poor um standardisation of er, um, but no it’s a laborious business and I probably should have learnt to use Endnote long ago. But, you know it’s one of those things where if one used it a lot it would be time-saving, there’s always the question of whether the time taken to learn a package is actually time well invested.


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". 


  I had problems with the data projector on a number of occasions and one student commented on this in their end of term feedback. I thought this was a typical smart arse in their first term knows everything and thinks of people of 60 haven’t any idea how to use equipment. It did put me off. 

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:

  Once upon a time I left a time at the end of the lectures for people to ask questions, no one ever did. And so there was just no point. And now what actually quite often happens, is that they wouldn’t ask questions um actually when everyone else was there but they’d come up after the lecture and ask the question, which they much prefer.

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: 

  [T]he ideal thing is when they both get their essays written well before the tutorial, they send me copies which of course we can do quickly now. And they send each other copies, and so we’ve all read both essays before the tutorial and we can spend an hour talking about the issues. That’s the ideal. What actually happens most of the time is um I don’t get any of the essays in advance and what I then do is to get one of them to read the essay out and we talk about that and I ask the other person who hasn’t read their essay out what are the things that they want to discuss that haven’t been raised. And then I take the other essay in and write comments and so on on it, but it’s not as efficient a use of the tutorial. Well, it does, actually I mean I find it really hard when someone’s reading their essay out to get through the tutorial in much under an hour and a half so actually there’s very little time for discussion because it takes them say twenty minutes to read their essay out. Longer, because I always interrupt, I mean, not, you know, just interrupt because one wants to talk about this bit as it comes up, and this bit, not, and it’s sometimes easier just to discuss this. But when you’re doing that it means that sometimes someone’s written a hugely long thing and realise, oh darn, I’ve only got five minutes to go, next people are coming. Butit’s very simple the mechanism these days that they can send electronic copies to each other and to me - that would be the ideal but it doesn’t much happen. Very occasionally they will.

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

  It’s important that the student has the opportunity to develop their knowledge of the subject physically with some one who can push them and take them down different avenues of understanding. Through having tutorials the student is motivated to read, prepare and write and this is constant throughout their university life. Um, it’s a lot of pressure but that’s what makes these students so successful isn’t it. 

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.