Refreshed by a coffee, I attended my first workshop presented by Lillian Austin, a current Flexible Learning Leader, & Christine Hayes from Swinburne. Lillian and Christine have been working on a project to embed generic skills into existing resources and key learnings so far have been:
· Yes, it’s possible
· Use a whole of course approach to address all generic skills.
· Don't cram all 10 into the one unit
· Need to engage support services that are available already
· Generic skills need to be developed by learners over period of time and seen as a continuum.
· There is variation between units in how they address generic skills - some are quite explicit others more underneath or hidden.
The term generic skills may be better replaced with ‘employability skills’ as this seems to be more attractive to learners. Swinburne has also been using their Industry Reference Groups as guides in where generic skills should be addressed.
The process that has been followed is:
· Mapping from materials to generic skills to determine if changes needed
· In some cases no real change or small changes needed.
· Can overdo this though if trying to cover too many generics, so need to see where the generic skills are best addressed within a range of competencies.
· Sometimes required additional text to cover in written materials (often this would be given verbally in a f2f situation)
· Also have added extra information about generic skills and why employers like them
The team is still grappling with how to assess and record people's work.
A project report should be available during September from the TAFE Frontiers website.
On another track, the novel I took away with me was Jasper Fforde's "The Well of Lost Plots" which is a literary detective novel. In this second book of a trilogy (soon to be quadruplets?) much of the action is set in a world where plots are constructed, characters developed, dialogue is written and so on. Each character in a book is played by a fictional person, who start as 'generics' and then are trained to take on parts in novels. Sadly, if a novel is not published, the text is salvaged and broken down into individual letters to be re-used, the generics are auctioned off to traders in book parts and the cycle begins again. Generics are not happy to be generics, and strive towards developing a personality and getting more than a bit part in a story. Maybe employability skills would be better. Sorry Lillian, my notes about your presentation have got rather off track :-)
Posted by Kirsty at August 16, 2004 04:49 PM