I gave two talks at Royal Holloway’s Education Exchange today. One was on WOMBAT, under the title “Do you feel lucky, punk?: Quote-first Referencing as an Assessment Design for Authentic Source Use”, and one was on Q&A lectures.

The Q&A one I delivered as a Q&A itself, because otherwise I would have vanished in a puff of hypocrisy. I think that one went better. Partly that is because the format did some of the work for me, and partly because it is a more honest way of talking about teaching. Teaching ideas are usually a bit messier than conference talks pretend.

The event itself was officially called “Education Exchange: Practice, Pedagogy and Futures”. Naomi Winstone gave the keynote on assessment and feedback in the age of AI, there were parallel sessions all day, and a lot of the programme was about the practical end of teaching: assessment design, feedback, AI, accessibility, student confidence, simulation, belonging, and the various ways people are trying to make higher education work a bit better.

There was a fairly good turnout. I think there were close to 100 people at the keynote, and the sessions I went to seemed to have about 20 to 25 people in each room, which is enough to make the conversations feel real without making them unwieldy. On the other hand we have rather a lot more teaching staff than that…

In general, it is much more show-and-tell than academic conference. I do not mean that as criticism. It is full of people who have made an effort with their teaching recently and want to tell to other people about it, and those people are inherently interesting to talk to. Not only that - it means that all the people who are likely to try something new, and who might need a hand from a like minded person in another department, meet each other.

Thanks to the organisers for putting it on.