Testing

‘The Idea of the University’

with the community of academic librarians

As noted on the Oui!Learn community’s home page, the academic library is one of the sites wherein the re-thinking of the university, as an ‘imagined geography’ in a geography or ecology of learning, is taking place. It is therefore very pleasing to report that matters related to such concerns will be discussed at a forthcoming event in the Critical Interventions in Higher Education Series at the University of Westminster.

At this event, Fiona Salisbury, Deputy Director of Learning and Engagement in the Library of La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, will talk about how the conversation about ‘the idea of the university’ can be expanded to include the diverse cohort of professional staff, including academic librarians, who are now an integral part of the delivery of higher education.

Academic librarians, Fiona contends, have not yet explicitly engaged with the current scholarship on the changing idea of the university, despite the library being an enduring part of the institutional landscape that lies at the heart of the university and which embodies a scholarly role that reaches back to the earliest universities.

So, book your place on the Eventbrite page and come along to room Chiltern 379, 115 New Cavendish Street at 2.00-3.30 pm on Tuesday 20 November 2018 for a lively discussion on “the multiple and liminal spaces that characterise the complexity of university life.”

 Oui!Learn at the Learning and Teaching Symposium

26 June 2018

The Oui!Learn community, in the form of Allan Parsons, Caroline Baruah and Georgios Tsagdis, gave a presentation at the Westminster Learning and Teaching Symposium on 26 June 2018 which sought to open up a debate about how the university in the age of the Great Recession might respond to its situation in terms of its institutional form, its pedagogical practices and its curricular design.

Read the Symposium Report

Read the Report 

There’s More to Appearances Than Meets the Eye

Read Workshop Report

Tue 27 February 2018, 10:00 – 12:00 GMT

Training Room, Harrow Library

University of Westminster, Harrow, England HA1 3TP

Aesthetics is not simply about beauty, taste, art or design. Aesthetic thinking operates across all disciplines and professions, to a large extent determining the ways in which sensible perceptions are ordered into rational thoughts.

This student-focused, active learning workshop encourages students from different areas of study to examine the similarities and differences across their disciplines and future professions, from biosciences to business to media studies, in the ways in which sensible observations gives rise to rational or logical sense and the ways in which rational sense is recorded and imposed upon sensible perceptions. Furthermore, students are led to examine the ways in which the sensible continues to trouble existing regimes of sense through the appearance of new phenomena, stimulating creativity within the discipline or profession and leading to practical change or innovation in the world.

The workshop also considers the technologies of perception which different disciplines and professions employ to define, frame and materialise their perceptions, opening up a secondary principle of creativity and innovation.