Designing postcards to inspire discussion about co-creation methods

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One deliverable in our #CoCreatingGFI project (which has a new website! Check it out here!) are a set of postcards to share our experiences with co-creation with other teachers and students — to invite discussions and inspire them to adapt the ideas for their own purposes. And we have designed the first five now! Click on images below for pdf downloads (The backsides contain space for all the usual postcard stuff [i.e. address and a message], plus a short explanatory text, and link & QR code to the website).

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“Mandatory coursework assignments can be, and should be, eliminated!” currently reading Haugan, Lysebo & Lauvas (2017)

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The claim in this article’s title, “Mandatory coursework assignments can be, and should be, eliminated!“, is quite a strong one, and maybe not fully supported by the data presented here. But the article is nevertheless worth a read (and the current reading in iEarth’s journal club!), because the arguments supporting that claim are nicely presented.

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Total internal reflection

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In the “static apnea” discipline in freediving, many cool pictures of athletes are taken underwater in a way that plays with the reflection of the athlete in the still water surface. This can lead to pretty spooky pictures (like the one of Victor in the top left). We do have other experiences with water, where there are areas where we can look in (or out), but then others where we can’t: In the bottom left, you see Mats and his shadow, even the individual tiles very clearly in the water. But the further back you look, the more you notice that the picture was taken from outside the water, because you start seeing more reflections in the water surface. In the bottom right, taken from within the water, you see reflections of all the divers and the lane markings in the surface except right at Edvin’s elbow, where we look out of the water and see what’s happening above the pool. And then in the top right, we don’t see the water surface at all — the only reason we know we are looking at Alex from within the water is that there are bubble rings floating between us and him. So what is going on here?

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A simple way to visualize how hydrostatic pressure increases with depth

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I did this demo for my freediving club Active Divers (and if you aren’t following us on Insta yet, that’s what I am taking all these pretty pictures for!): 1.5l PET bottle with holes punched in every 2cm, then filled with water. Looks cool and works pretty well (except the second hole from the bottom up, which I punched in a part of the bottle’s wall that wasn’t vertical, so the resulting jet doesn’t come out horizontally in the beginning and messes up the picture. Should have thought that through before…).

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Denmark Strait overflow in a tank experiment

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Since our Denmark Strait tank experiment from 2013 (see here in a post from 2014!) is still the one I refer to when I want to point to pictures of such an overflow experiment, I decided to do the experiment again to take new (and hopefully better) pictures. Three experiments later, I am not sure if the pictures are any better, but I tried…

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“Conflict is not abuse” by Schulman (2016)

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The title of this book, “Conflict is not Abuse. Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair” (Schulman, 2016), caught my eye in the office library. It looked like something I really wanted to read, but at the same time really did not. For most of the last year, I have pushed so hard to include microaggressions in our courses (– possibly overstating harm to make a point?), and generally work towards anti-discriminatory practices, and I felt like this book would probably prompt reflections that might actually change my thinking quite substantially. And who has time for that? Anyway, the book therefore sat on my desk for weeks when I was first too busy to read anything without immediate and obvious relevance to what I was supposed to be doing, and then, when I did have time to read, there were other books that didn’t scare me as much, like Rachel’s “Confident Assessment in Higher Education”, or “The Slow Professor”. But then some nice and sunny day, I was in a mindset where I was ready to “motivate personal growth by seeking discomfort”, picked up the book, and I am so glad I did! Continue reading →

“Confident Assessment in Higher Education”, by Rachel Forsyth (2023)

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I am so lucky to work with so many inspiring colleagues here at Lund University, and today I read my awesome colleague Rachel Forsyth’s new book on “confident assessment in higher education” (Forsyth, 2023). It is a really comprehensive introduction to assessment and totally worth a read, as an introduction to assessment or even just for a refresher of all the different aspects that need to be considered, and suggestions for how to think about them (while reading, I sent several photos of tables to a colleague because it is directly relevant for a course she is planning that we talked about the other day). For me, the most interesting part were the suggested questions to ask yourself about assignment tasks, and ways to answer them:

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Developing a “student cruise bingo” to make learning visible & fun

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I am super excited to work with Kjersti again on an upcoming student cruise next month; she is such a great teacher and it is always inspiring to observe her interactions with students! Also: We always have lots of fun ideas, and usually act on them pretty spontaneously, too. Like this one: We want to bring a “cruise bingo” with us, so here is what my current planning looks like!

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“The slow professor — Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy” by Berg & Seeber (2016)

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I have been recommended the book “The slow professor” from many different directions. It brings the “slow movement” (of slow food, slow travel, etc) into academia. And since I am a big fan of slow travel (as evidenced by for example my series of blog posts on the two day trips each way it takes me to get to my second job in Bergen…), I gave it a shot. Summary of what was most relevant to me below:

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