ESRC Doctoral studentships in Scotland

If anyone is thinking ahead to PhD, ESRC doctoral awards are now available in Education here at Edinburgh and across Scotland, via the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science. See more at:

http://www.socsciscotland.ac.uk/pathways/education

Deadline is 3 May. Anyone considering going on to PhD in this or later years should have a chat with one of the programme team about their ideas and plans.

Evaluation reminder

Just a quick reminder – everyone who took a course last semester should now have received an email from their tutor inviting their feedback on the course, with a link to a brief online questionnaire.

If you haven’t yet done so, please do take 5 minutes to give us your feedback – it genuinely helps us with our programme of course renewal and re-design.

If you don’t have the link to your questionnaire any more, please drop me, or your tutor, an email and we’ll get it to you again.

Special online seminar: Education and the social web

We’re really pleased to announce a special online seminar for MSc in E-learning staff and students by Dr Norm Friesen – all welcome!

Norm will be discussing ‘Education and the social web. Connective learning and the commercial imperative’, a session which will be based on his recent paper in First Monday.

The seminar will be Tuesday March 8th, 19.30 UK time. We’ll be using Wimba to hear Norm present and to discuss his thoughts on the commerical imperative driving much social media and limiting its educational potential.

There’s more about Norm’s seminar on the Events tab.

Numbers will be limited, so if you’d like to come, please drop me an email at sian.bayne@ed.ac.uk, so that we can make sure you get the info you need to access Wimba on the 8th.

Looking forward to seeing you!

EUSA teaching awards

The University has asked us to post this up : )

This year you can nominate in the categories of:

Best Course

Best Department

Best Director of Studies

Detailed, useful feedback

Teach First Award for Innovative teaching methods

KPMG Award for Helping students gain Employable Skills

Kendall Award for teaching in Medicine
Campbell Award for teaching in Humanities and Social Sciences
Van Heyningen Award for teaching in Science and Engineering

Overall High Performer

Vitae Award for Best Postgraduate who Tutors

Nominate at: http://www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/teachingawards/

Polls close at the end of the month.

WebCT outage

annoyed monkey

We have received a notice from our Information Services:

“WebCT will not be available Saturday 5th February 06:00 to Sunday 6th February 16:00 (With a further 6 hour At Risk period from 16:00) AND again Saturday 19th February 06:00 to Sunday 20th February 16:00 (With a further 6 hour At Risk period from 16:00).

We apologise for the inconvenience this will cause. It is due to ongoing refurbishment work at Kings Buildings [our Science campus] which will result in an outage period for the majority of the University services over these two weekends. More details are available at the URL below. http://tinyurl.com/6e7fd63

We have registered our concern about this , as we don’t think this sort of unavailability is acceptable, particularly for online and part-time students, but I’m afraid we are unlikely to be able to change the scheduled outage.

So please, if you are intending to do work on the weekend of 5/6 February and 19/20 February, try to plan ahead a bit and download any course materials beforehand.

You will still be able to use your course wikis, Twitter and Second Life to talk to each other, though you won’t be able to log in to the Hub or the Library Catalogue as EASE will not be working.

Please accept our apologies for this – and be reassured we are doing our best to make a case for it not happening again.