Learning & Teaching Conference 2010 - now online

Leeds Media Services filmed and edited The Seventh Annual University of Leeds Learning & Teaching Conference in January.

LTC7 2010 also provides teaching and support staff at the University of Leeds with an excellent opportunity to find out more about innovative and exciting ways for teachers and students to learn, and at the same time offers a unique chance to network with colleagues from all around the University.

Keynote speakers

We are delighted to announce two excellent keynote speakers for LTC7:
Ray Land is Professor of Higher Education and Head of the Centre for Academic Practice and Learning Enhancement (CAPLE) at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow UK. His research interests include academic development, threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge, research-teaching linkages, and theoretical aspects of digital learning. He is the author of Educational Development: Discourse, Identity and Practice (Open University Press 2004) and co-editor of Education in Cyberspace (RoutledgeFalmer 2005), Overcoming Barriers to Student Learning: Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge (Routledge 2006), Threshold Concepts within the Disciplines (Sense Publishers 2008) and Research-Teaching Linkages: Enhancing Graduate Attributes (QAA 2008).  A new volume, Threshold Concepts and Transformational Learning will be published in early 2010 (Sense Publishers, Rotterdam)
Visit http://personal.strath.ac.uk/ray.land/home.htm for more information.


Liz Beaty, Director of Strategic Academic Practice and Partnership at the University of Cumbria. Liz spent five years at HEFCE where she was Director for Learning and Teaching. With an excellent reputation as a speaker, Liz currently holds strategic responsibility for teaching and learning, participation and progression, and partnerships with other UK HEIs and FE colleges and has overall strategic responsibility for the University's FE Provision.
For more information about Liz, please visit www.cumbria.ac.uk/AboutUs/TheUniversity/University%20Management%20Team/Liz%20Beaty.aspx

Routes into Language Careers – part of EXPO 09 now online

In November 2009 Leeds Media Services filmed the Routes into Language Careers – part of EXPO 09 for the University of Leeds.  A careers extravaganza including specialist language recruiters, talks for sixth formers on careers with languages and interpreting workshops. For Y12/Y13 pupils plus undergraduate students. 
Organised in partnership with the NNI, the Faculty of Arts and the University of Leeds Careers Centre.

The video can now be watched online at - http://www.nationalnetworkforinterpreting.ac.uk/assets/video/expo09/index.html

Link courtesy of Dragos Ciobanu.

LMS film Talking Points: Why are inequalities in health greater now than at any times since the 1920s?

On Tuesday the 10th of February Leeds Media Services filmed "Why are inequalities in health greater now than at any times since the 1920s?" part of the talking Points series of lectures organised by The Yorkshire and Humber Teaching Public Health Network (YHTPHN).

The third in the Talking Points series was given by Professor Danny Dorling from University of Sheffield.  Danny Dorling's extensive works take consideration of a wealth of data and statistics and are used to provide an exceptional description of poverty within the UK.  He presents these with passion and uses issues to describe issues that matter.

"He has uncovered evidence that the government would perhaps prefer stays buried: that Labour has presided over an era of unprecedented inequality widening and declining social mobility.

Dorling has demonstrated that where a person is born remains the primary determinant of their status, health and wealth in later life. He has steadily chipped away at progressive politicians' most treasured policy ambitions. "By 18 or 20 your life is largely mapped out for you," he argues. "You'll either have interesting jobs where you use your mind your whole life, or your life will be working in a servile occupation."
The answers, he suggests, lie in the concentration of more and more wealth in the hands of the rich - and the government's failure to address it with, for example, more progressive taxation. As a Labour voter, he says New Labour's failure to tackle the flourishing wealth of the already rich is "very odd because there's more and more evidence that shows that having more and more rich people in a place is bad for people in that place".

Dorling admits that things might have been even worse had the Conservatives been re-elected in 1997, but the figures are, he feels, an indictment of Labour none the less." (The Guardian, February 2006)

Dorling writes that "this is the first supposedly progressive government that has seen inequalities widen under it. Wasn't New Labour supposed at least to be about equality of opportunity? We've not only gone back to 1930s levels of inequalities between places but we are on the reverse trajectory. It's not just that things are unequal, it is that we are heading towards dramatic levels of future inequality between areas."

"The key thing is recognising what's happening. Just wanting something to be better doesn't mean it happens. They thought [in the mid 90s] that by not doing really horrible things, things would get better; thinking that moving the rudder slightly would help" (Dorling 2006).

The edited version will be online soon.

The Yorkshire and Humber Teaching Public Health Network - http://www.yhtphn.co.uk/

Talking Points: Why are inequalities in health greater now than at any times since the 1920s? - http://www.yhtphn.co.uk/index.php?id=326

To download Professor Danny Dorling's biography please click here.

Photo courtesy of Catherine Grinold.