Welcome to the WJETT blog
What is WJETT?
The WJETT blog or Warwick Journal of Education - Transforming Teaching blog is designed to encourage staff and students to disseminate good practice and to engage with their peers on academic cultural critique or areas of research that they find interesting. With the increased focus on ‘teachers as researchers’ in the sector, many qualified teachers are expected to publish the outcomes of any action research projects they undertake. The WJETT blog can be the first step on your journey towards publishing and enables you to experience publishing and reviewing in a friendly and supportive environment.
You will need to scroll down the page below the tags to see the posts.
What are OERs?
Put simply these are “free and openly licensed educational materials that can be used for teaching, learning, research, and other purposes.” https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/What_is_OER%3FLink opens in a new window
You are allowed to take resources and in general reuse them for your own purpose.
What do I need to know?
Creative Commons (CC) Licences: These tell the user what you are allowed to do with the resources – some educators share resources for free, with almost no “control” over them, others share their resources with conditions about not using them commercially (i.e. you are not allowed to use the resources for profit). See hereLink opens in a new window for more information.
Why are they relevant to me?
There are hundreds of resources which are appropriate to teachers at all stages of their journey, from PGCE to experienced classroom practitioner. You can use them knowing you are not going to fall foul of copyright and there are plenty for your subject. For example, Computer Scientists should look at http://the.computing.cafe/Link opens in a new window for a very extensive range of resources all CC.
What are the benefits?
There is some excellent practice out there – for example https://nobaproject.com/Link opens in a new window for Psychologists allows you to make a bespoke textbook with just a few clicks (and it’s CC).
Many resources offer a scoring system (similar to Amazon etc.) to allow you to differentiate the quality for example this resource on authentic assessmentLink opens in a new window.
Academic publishers are getting involved too, with Springer publishing a number of OER journals hereLink opens in a new window. It’s free to the user and in general you can tweak a resource to make it “just right”.
What are the drawbacks?
Finding quality resources is not as easy as using a popular search engine – instead you have to use a search engine specifically appropriate for OER such as the ones found hereLink opens in a new window. It requires a mindset change to create some work and then to pass it on knowing that someone else is going to potentially adapt and enhance what you consider to be a completed piece of work.
Some of the resources are created and then are not updated again as the designer runs out of steam or changes their focus. An example is a set of video lectures which are only half completed. Lots of these resources point towards MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) which research has shown to not engage students over the long term, when studied without educator input.
Great now what?
Try it. Search for a resource using the search engine link in the “what are the benefits” section and see what you think of it.
Writing guidance
Can I write about anything in my blog post?
Yes pretty much. Academic cultural critique (Thomson and Mewburn, 2013) is always a good source of content for academic blogs. This can include (but is not limited to) comments and reflections on funding; higher education policy or academic life. You might also want to consider blogging about:
- Academic practice (Saper, 2006)
- Information and/or self-help advice
- Technical, teaching and careers advice
- Your research or practice
- How you’ve undertaken research
- The impact of research on your practice
- An area of research/practice that interests you
- Your teaching experiences/reflections
How long can my blog post be?
Each individual blog post should be no longer than 500 words. Long blocks of text are sometimes hard for readers to digest. Break up your content into shorter paragraphs, bullet points and lists whenever possible. Also include a list of keywords or tags as this makes it easier for Google to find your work.
Do I need to use citations?
No, this is a reflective piece so it does not need to include citations (but you obviously can include them if they are relevant).
Can I include links or images?
We would encourage you to include links to any articles that you have considered whilst writing your blog post. We also welcome the use of images (as long as you have permission to use them) as they can often help to illustrate a point and obviously will not be included in the word limit. Please remember this is a public site so if you want to include images of your students in your classes then you will need permission to do this.
What is the process for submitting a piece of work?
Your blog post should be emailed to A.Ball.1@warwick.ac.uk. Once the submission has been reviewed it will either be uploaded at the beginning of the next available week or sent back to you for editing if it requires amendments. You should then send the amended work to me once again and I will then upload it.