Blog

Corbetts

The nights are fair drawing in and finding Munros we can do in the available daylight and weather conditions becomes more and more difficult, particularly given we’re also…

October 4, 2025

Supporting positive behaviour

I was grateful to have the opportunity to attend the Positive Relationships and Behaviour in Schools Scotland Conference in Edinburgh last week. My reason for attending is…

September 23, 2025

Munro Tidy Tuesday

I was immediately obsessed when I saw the Tidy Tuesday theme was Scottish Munros - we have climbed 58/282 so far. As I assume is the case for the majority of baggers, we use …

August 31, 2025

Supporting scholarship in yourself and others

Today I visited Queen Mary University London where I met with the Teaching and Scholarship staff at the School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences. I was asked to talk…

From PERU, with love

Today was my last official event as Centre Head for the Pedagogy and Education Research Unit (PERU), and I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about why I think…

December 11, 2024

MCQs in the age of AI

I shared this guide on Writing Good Multiple Choice Test Questions on social media and the first response I got on both LinkedIn and BlueSky was whether MCQs hold up in the…

October 26, 2024

Psychology of Swearing UWS

This website accompanies the Psychology of Swearing talk held on Friday 19th April at UWS.

ChatGPT: Student guidance for essays

Part 1: Using ChatGPT to create teaching materials: Data simulation & MCQs

Using ChatGPT for learning & teaching: Correcting auto-transcripts

Alongside Wil Tovio and Rachel O’Neill, I’ve written before in the Times Higher about the problems that requiring academics to produce corrected captions introduces. If you…

ChatGPT: Student guidance for mulitple-choice assessments

Part 1: Using ChatGPT to create teaching materials: Data simulation & MCQs

Using ChatGPT to create teaching materials: marking criteria & rubrics

This is the second in a series of blog posts discussing how I’m using ChatGPT to create teaching materials (see here for part 1 on using it for data simulation and creating…

Using ChatGPT to create teaching materials: Data simulation & MCQs

There’s an overwhelming amount of discussion about student uses of ChatGPT that is mainly concerned with academic misconduct. Whilst I understand that it’s a huge problem…

Flexible Submission Windows

Like many, the number of extension requests on my course increased over the last two years. This is not a “OH THOSE BLOODY STUDENTS” post. I don’t blame students for any of…

August 23, 2022

Pivot 7: Grief

Last Saturday we were supposed to be in London for the West End production of Sister Act, with Whoopi Goldberg reprising the lead role and Jennifer Saunders as Mother…

August 27, 2020

Pivot 6: Human after all

This week I continued recording my lectures and asynchronous lab videos. As I’ve already said on Twitter, I largely refuse to do any editing - there were a couple of moments…

August 21, 2020

Lec Rec impact

List of institutions linking to lecture capture guides from Nordmann et al. (2020).

August 11, 2020

Pivot 3: Party

This week I finished working through the assessment information for both my Level 1 course and my MSc Research Methods courses. The latter was fairly quick as that course…

Pivot 2: Academic, heal thyself

The problem with starting your first blog with a pithy quote is that you feel pressured to do it for every one.

Pivot 1: Academic Serenity

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference - Reinhold Niebuhr