Poetry to Music Event - May

Laurie, lecturer in music, came in today to talk about his ideas and hopes for the poetry-into-music event in May.

I think it sounds great.

The dates are not finalised yet, but it will be some time during International Week (commencing 11 May). Hopefully the event will take place in the Music Box auditorium.

The details of the format need to worked out, but Laurie's idea was for you guys to give a reading of your poem, possibly followed by a discussion, and then followed by Laurie's students' musical interpretation of the poem.

Some people suggested leaving the discussion bit until the end. As I say, these details can be worked out as we go. The main thing was that everyone agreed to the idea of the event.

If you have any ideas or comments, please post them here ...

Reading assessment - 1

I gave out the first reading assessment today and everyone worked their way through the questions. Not everyone finished - we can take it up from there next week.

Again, the questions will seem very familiar from the listening assessment. Remember the purpose of these tasks is to help develop your summary, analysis and evaluation skills - the development of these skills are important, indeed crucial, for further and higher education students.

The text continues the theme from the Enemies of Reason programme and focuses on the philosopher David Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment. If you want to view the BBC programme on Hume which the writer refers to, go to ClickView, then Documentaries and look out for a programme entitled "Age of Genius." You don't need to watch the programme, but you do need to do the reading assessment.

Preparation for reading assessments

Today we took up from last week and looked at reading skills in more depth. We discussed, in more depth, the differences between tabloid and broadsheet newspapers in terms of content and style.

We also looked at the notion of readership and looked at The Metro as a case study (see link to BBC article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7942017.stm).

We looked at two articles on school shootings in the US in 2006 as reported by a tabloid (The Daily Record) and a broadsheet (The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/oct/03/amishschoolshootingamericas) – sorry that Record article doesn’t seem to exist online anymore, but I have printed copies.

I stripped away the formatting from these articles and we focussed on the language only. We discussed how the language reflected the complexity of ideas and supported the two purposes.

We also had a look at an example reading assessment – both the text and the student’s responses. The questions are very similar to the questions you’ve been answering on the Word of Mouth and Enemies of Reason documentaries. Please bring these handouts next week.

The student’s answers will give you an idea of the depth and approach of your own responses to this assessment.

We will be spending the next two weeks working through the two reading assessments. On the bright side, there will be a well-earned two-week holiday at the end ….

Worst Irish accents on film

Last we we got into a discussion at some stage about bad accents in film. Here's a link which lists the top 10 worst Irish accents in film (Sean Connery and Julia Roberts appear twice):

http://entertainment.ie.msn.com/Worst%20Irish%20Accents.aspx

If you'd like to share any other examples of bad accents, please add a comment ...

Active listening and discussion on "Enemies of Reason"

Today we focussed a bit more on listening skills. We’ve listening to radio and TV programmes over the last few weeks. In many ways, these are as much exercises in note-taking and analysis and evaluation as they are listening.

However, we looked at listening today in of terms inter-personal communication. I introduced the notion of “active listening” and we did an exercise at the start of the class which focussed our attention on how we listen.

Dom observed the various one-to-one discussions and came up with three types of listeners: the note-takers; the eye-contacters; and the interactive listener. Very perceptive observations by Dom.

We discussed what talkers looked for in a listener (and what they got in the exercise).

Some of the positive listening skills which were identified were:

- Listener giving feedback
- Listener using comments to clarify
- Listener obviously engaged
- Positive body language
- Giving advice

Some people identified “giving advice” as a positive listening skill, but there was some debate whether this is always desirable.

Some of the less positive elements which were identified were:

- Lack of eye contact (although this, in fairness, was when the listener was taking notes)
- Listener inaccurate when summarising information
- Giving advice (again)
- Taking notes (is this always negative)

Part of the reason for this focus on active listening was to draw your attention to on another aspect of the course which is assessed: discussions.

These discussions assess your ability to speak clearly and accurately on a subject. It is also important that we see that you are actively listening and that you can handle questions. We've had plenty of these throughout the year and, as a class, you are very capable of having engaging and thought-provoking discussions.

Today, we had a discussion based around the Enemies of Reason programme. Everyone contributed very positively to that (although, of course, many agreed to disagree on a number of points). Thanks to all of you for engaging positively in that discussion. If you’d like to continue the discussion, feel free to do so here by using the comment function.

Nadine said that she was going to a spiritualist tonight and I’ve asked her to share her thoughts on the experience here.

Finally, I previewed what we’d be moving on to next. We will be using the same analysis skills which we used to study the various documentaries to start analysing written texts (in particular we’ll be focusing on some newspaper articles).

We discussed the difference between tabloid and broadsheet/quality newspapers. We’ll take it up from there next week.