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Phillip is a university lecturer in Modern British and European History. His job consists of a combination of teaching, administration and research. Teaching commitment is about 8 hours per week tutorials, and 16+ lectures per annum. His research area is on London History and Architecture. In terms of administration he is in charge of the college website redevelopment, he is a literary directory of a learned society and general editor of the Royal Historical Society for the Bibliography of British History and on a series of committees. Phillip considered the editor role for the Royal Historical society as one of his most time-consuming tasks. Liaising with publishers and authors, he reads manuscripts that have been submitted electronically and edits them using Word's "Track Changes" functionality. He mentions that a lot of people he sends the manuscripts too are surprised by the track changes and that often they don't know about it.
- [I]t is curious how many of ones colleagues you send that to and they say “How did you do that?”. People aren’t, some quite surprising people don’t seem to be aware of track changes and I, I must have been using for about two, three years now, two years, but I, but I, you know, it was obviously on my computer for a long time before I actually got used to the notion that one could use it. So yeah, that does, that is helpful, and I use it for a lot of things I use it for a lot of documents that are circulating to, you know, college-wise as well.
Version control is a problem though: “there's an issue about what draft you're using as it creates muddles:”
- [W]ell it’s one of the problems of electronic stuff. People send you things at various stages and I did get in a muddle last week over which was the authority version of a, well basically because I hadn’t transferred something from a floppy onto my hard drive, I was editing the wrong, um, um the penultimate version rather than the final version and it was quite serious, potentially quite serious. So you can get in a muddle.
E-mail distribution for the subjects he teaches is a large administrative task. Mailing lists have been set up for each year group and graduates which is "very efficient". The students submit their essays via e-mail and all of Phillip’s reading lists (word files) are online on the college intranet . The reading lists do not have embedded urls as Phillip feels that these do not encourage students own searching practices. "In terms of teaching I think I've got things as streamlined as they could be".
Phillip does not use any bibliographic software, most references he cuts and pastes out of the Royal Historical Society Bibliography.
For lecturers Phillip prepares a handout - usually word document sometimes coupled with photocopied illustrative material. The handout largely summarises the lecture argument and strips out the more factual lecture information. He does not use power-point but may do next year but says there are "so many obstacles in the way of doing PowerPoint in the Humanities" - lecture theatres do not have data projectors or there is no assistance to set up if there are. Phillip largely only uses power-point for illustrative material, quotations or to simplify complex processes. He feels he needs more help with power-point but does not want to go on a course because "you end up having to sit through hours of stuff that’s irrelevant to actually what you really want to do, what you really want is some pretty simple tasks". he often asks his students to help him with IT related issues.
Tutorials are generally small groups of 2 - 4 students. The reading list is supplied electronically and essay comments hand written. He has his tutorials in his offices but often takes the students to the computer lab for various things e.g. literature searches or demo electronic resources. He finds the level of student awareness concerning electronic resources very low, but that is partly due to insufficient training on the part of the department/college. He recognises that students are increasingly using Google to conduct searches for material but worries that there is a lot of high quality resources that are not exposed to the search engine. Phillip is in great favour of electronic resources but has "issues" about "the relationship between the electronic stuff and how people learn from them". In terms of online reading lists that hyperlink to online articles he states:
- Lets say I create those reading lists with embedded links to journal articles, surely one of the by-products of that is that they no-longer have familiarity with using a catalogue, and one of the things I would like them to do is find out things for themselves . . . it’s a generation of students who think that research consists of going to Google and pulling something of the internet, that that’s what research is, and it’s profoundly alien to what we do. Although I’m very much in favour of electronic resources, there are still quite serious issues about how people learn from them, the relationship between the electronic world and the learning process.
He has used online course texts before with his students but found the students were very resistant to this:
- First of all they couldn't find the stuff so I ended up having to answer all their e-mails talking them through it; secondly, they didn't like the fact that they weren't in proper editions and I did wonder whether they really had by the end of term realised "wow, every printed book is available here 1500-1700, this is an amazing resource, I can use this for my own research purposes, I should be playing with this in creative ways". That's what learning should be about.
Phillip has considered using discussion boards in his teaching but is concerned that they will create more work for him and forms of dependency within the students:
- [T]here is something about the electronic world which leads to what I call the open beak, little birds in the nest with their open mouths expecting things to be dropped in. And that is something that ever more communication does, because then people expect instantaneous responses to every kind of enquiry and I think that's something that needs to be built into electronic resources - barriers. You know . . . we are not permanently available, permanently downloadable, which is what they want.
There are plans to restructure the college website which will link to subject and tutor areas in WebLearn (to be set up). Phillip feels that it is important for WebLearn to be integrated within the whole IT structure of the college, rather than seen as a "stand-alone thing". Courses need to be in collaboration with "local" people to make the training less abstract and support needs to be more personal (i.e. not forum based, telephone/help desk support). He feels that there would be positive benefits from using WebLearn - saving time, increasing consistency and sharing resources.
Phillip is concerned about the amount of resources that he needs to download and the storage capacity of his machine. He feels his "research universe" is still very fragmented and there is no proper gateway to the resources he needs.