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The legal ethics of tweeting, facebooking & blogging.

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http://www.teach-ict.com/gcse_new/being_online/blogs/miniweb/pg6.htm

Aidan
Catherine

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Natasha and Sian

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Blogs & Wikis: New Education Tools? / Blog Pros and Cons

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Spiderworking.com - Social Media For Small Business

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I'm always talking about how great blogging is for your business but what are the disadvantages? If you know what they are before you start you can plan to avoid them.
If I could write a letter to myself the day I started blogging, I'd commend myself on taking such a big step but I'd also tell the younger me what the disadvantages of blogging for my business are. It wouldn't have put me off but it would have saved me time and helped me achieve better results quicker.

Even seasoned bloggers stumble from time to time, a great fear can grab you and ask you if you are wasting time marketing your business online. The result of one of these panics was this podcast and a better plan for the future. It's all been onwards and upwards since.

Listen below to hear about 8 disadvantages of blogging for business and how to deal with them

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Disadvantage 1: Time

Time is scarce for small business owners and it's the biggest obstacle in the way of us achieving everything we want to do. It's a huge disadvantage for bloggers. Blogging is time-consuming, my first post was under 100 words and took me half a day to construct and publish. It wasn't the writing that took the time but the editing and constant proofreading. Give me half a day of uninterrupted time now and I'd be able to produce 3 blog posts of 1000 words or more.

You do get quicker at blogging the more you do it but that doesn't necessarily help if you don't have the time now. You may have decided that blogging is for you but have let it slip down your to-do list. My advice is to allocate time now, allocate time every week to write. Plan your posts in advance so you can maximise that assigned time.

Disadvantage 2: The techie stuff

I've seen so many businesses stumble at this first hurdle. If you want to blog on your own website you'll need to build that site on a platform that allows blogging (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc). If your site doesn't currently support blogging don't put it off. There are plenty of places that you can blog offsite.

My first business blog was launched on Blogger, I didn't have the budget for a new website at the time so I just started blogging on a platform that I could afford. There are so many free blogging sites available now you have no excuse. You can use WordPress.com, Blogger, Medium, Tumblr, Square Space. You can even blog using LinkedIn posts or Facebook notes.
Don't let the technology get in the way of blogging, just start writing now and worry about the tech later.
Disadvantage 3: The curse of inconsistency

If you've ever visited a blog on a website and noticed it hasn't been updated for a year, or more you'll know it looks bad. A dead blog is worse than no blog at all. If you are going to blog on your own site or even one of the free blogging platforms it's crucial that you have a regular posting schedule.

Consistency is not only good for keeping your site looking alive but it also ensures you stay dedicated to your blog. At the very minimum, you should be blogging once a month and preferably more frequently than that. If you don't think you'll be able to keep to a consistent schedule use LinkedIn posts or Facebook notes instead of your own site. It's less noticeable when you are infrequent on those platforms.

Disadvantage 4: Reflects badly on your brand

A good, well written and thought out blog, full of useful posts and information is a great brand asset. A poorly written blog, rushed together, with low-quality posts full of typos and spelling errors could be doing more harm than good.

Blogging can't be something you do in a hurry, you have to put thought into your content and you should always proof read and spell check before you hit publish. I tend to sleep on a blog post before I publish. I always spot something the next day that needs editing.

( Hat tip to Katia from Proper Food for this one)

Disadvantage 5: Content shock and SEO

It used to be easier to blog when I started out. There was less content online and fewer bloggers. Now it's much harder. You'll find thousands of results for every topic you can think of. The days of the Googlewhack are well and truly over.

We are living in the era of what Mark Schaefer calls content shock. Search engine optimisation used to be one of the key advantages of blogging but things have changed. Today I believe blogging is more about building a strong and loyal community around your business. Your customers will get to know and trust you through your content and it's your social channels in the most part, not the search engines that will help you do that.

That's not to say SEO isn't important, I'm battling those search results with every post I write, but focus on your audience, not the search engines.

Disadvantage 6: Your Friends Think You're Nuts

People who work in normal jobs find it hard to understand the life of a small business owner. They see us working long hours and weekends and think we must be mad. When they find out that much of that time isn't spent doing 'real work' but marketing online they are often astounded.

Look at it from their point of view. If they have a regular job they just have to turn up on time and complete their allocated work. A small business owner has to do the day to day work and market their business, manage their accounts, take phone calls, sell and more. The time you spend marketing may look like wasted time to them but if you plan it well and measure success you know it's worth it.

When you start blogging you'll want to talk about it with your friends, be prepared for the confused looks and blank faces.

( Hat tip to Kate from Pet Sitters Ireland for this one)

Disadvantage 7: Employee and Management buy-in

I'm lucky, I am a solopreneur, I work for myself and I answer to no one but my clients. Not everyone is this lucky. If you work in a larger organisation getting buy-in from the people you work with can be a struggle.

Do your homework before you approach your boss. Look at how a blog can benefit your business, find topics that would work well on your site and make forecasts on how you can grow website visitors and how you can channel them into the sales funnel as a result.

It can be harder to get employees on board. If you get management buy-in encourage them to lead by example. Get them to share their insights in blog posts early on. The employees are more likely to contribute if they see the management doing the same.

Disadvantage 8: Customers undervalue your expertise and look for freebies

When people visit your site they will find all the great information you share in blog posts. Your blog is the place where you share your expertise for free but some will want to exploit you further. People will begin to email and even phone you for help and advice. You need to decide how you are going to deal with this. In most cases, I don't mind when people get in touch. I like to find out what problems people are experiencing, it gives me new topics to blog about. I help whenever I can (within reason).
Some of those enquiries turn into prospects and sales, more turn into advocates spreading the word about me and my business.
( Hat tip to Joanne Dewberry for this one)

Conclusion
The advantages of blogging can outweigh the disadvantages. If you want to ensure you are getting those benefits I'd recommend:
1. Defining exactly the customers you are writing for
2. Planning content in advance that will appeal to your customers
3. Define what blogging success means to you and monitor your path to that success on a regular basis
4. Be consistent
Am I missing anything? What do you think the biggest disadvantage to blogging is? I'd love to know so leave me a comment below.
Do you believe in Karma? If so I highly recommend that you go over to iTunes or Stitcher and leave a review on this podcast, you never know what wonderful things might happen in return.

If you've been following my challenges or if you have done something on your blog that has worked well I'd love to hear about it. You can leave me a comment below, tweet me @spiderworking or snap me @spiderworking.

Do Facebook ads make you tear your hair out? Let us manage your Facebook ads for you. We'll save you time and improve results. Get A Quote Now.

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8 Disadvantages Of Blogging For Business That You Need To Know About Before You Start

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I'm always talking about how great blogging is for your business but what are the disadvantages? If you know what they are before you start you can plan to avoid them. If I could write a letter to myself the day I started blogging, I'd commend myself on taking such a big step but I'd also tell the younger me what the disadvantages of blogging for my business are.

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Colleagues and students can read what you have written.

Rachel and Iona

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Back in May I started writing a blog more or less at same time as I began to engage with Twitter for professional purposes. My first steps were tentative, but quite quickly I found that writing bits and pieces about my school, my lessons and my views on education was hugely rewarding. It was a great way to sort out my ideas and reflect on my own practice. To my surprise and delight other people started to show an interest, leaving encouraging comments that spurred me on.

At an early stage I discovered the blog of David Didau (@learningspy) who inspired me with his principled, witty style and his dedication to examining the details of classroom practice. David, along with Alex Quigley (@HuntingEnglish), Tom Bennett and fellow heads Geoff Barton and John Tomsett set the standard that I try to emulate. It may not be a coincidence that they are all English teachers but I'm determined not to be intimidated! Encouragingly, I find new blogs by teachers of all subjects all the time.

Since May I've had close to 45,000 blog hits from more than 100 countries; it's amazing really. I now feel part of a community of bloggers and I've had the pleasure of exchanging ideas and meeting lots of interesting teachers and leaders, including all the people listed above, as a direct result. It has already been a fabulous journey that has definitely enabled me to be more effective as head and a teacher. I also think it has helped some of the people I work with to understand my thinking; I often express myself more clearly in a blog than I do elsewhere.

The main point of writing this is to encourage more teachers to have a go. Whatever your role in a school, there will be people interested in your thoughts about what you do all day and how you think you can be more effective. Here are my tips:

Top 10 don'ts when starting your blog:

* Don't worry too much about who will read it to begin with; just write something you want to say and then build up a collection over time. You'll be amazed by how many hits you get but it doesn't happen immediately.

* Don't be put off by the technical aspect; blog sites are very easy to navigate and you can add extra features as you go along. Take time at the start to choose your blog's appearance from all the options, lifting ideas from existing blogs, but once you've started, it is very straightforward.

* Don't forget to tag each blog with keywords; this will help later when people want to search for ideas and help you build a tag cloud which is always an engaging feature.

* Don't try to spread yourself too thinly, covering every topic there is; the best blogs are those that have a clear identity and style, building a set of resources you can rely on.

* Don't forget that anyone you know might read your blog including students and colleagues. Better still, imagine they will definitely read it.

* Don't be afraid of a bit of self-promotion; Twitter is the best way. Without Twitter, most blogs would be accidental discoveries and it's really helpful when links are tweeted. For me, Twitter and blogging are inextricably linked.

* Don't think that your material isn't worthy or is too ordinary. If you write about your experience in teaching, it will be interesting, especially if you are evaluating what you've been doing. Even describing one lesson that threw up ideas or challenges is worth reading about.

* Don't forget to hyperlink the text to other blogs and webpages you refer to. This makes your blog useful as well as interesting. It always helps to engage as much as you can with other people blogging on the same topics as you, for mutual support and cross-referencing.

* Don't write too much or too little; if it starts feeling like an essay, stop. Short and punchy is better than long and drawn-out, unless you have a lot of material. I have trouble with this myself! In truth, a lot of people won't read it all anyway... but they might not come back if there isn't much substance.

* Don't wait. Start blogging now. You won't regret it.
Tom Sherrington is the headteacher of King Edward VI Grammar School, Chelmsford. He blogs here, and you can follow him on Twitter @headguruteacher.
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Topics

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Top 10 don'ts for wannabe teacher bloggers

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Back in May I started writing a blog more or less at same time as I began to engage with Twitter for professional purposes. My first steps were tentative, but quite quickly I found that writing bits and pieces about my school, my lessons and my views on education was hugely rewarding.

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Anna and Jo
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2016/aug/12/social-media-law-an-essential-guide
Defamation Act 2013
Personal ramifications which could effect your professional status, employment...

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Where does the authority begin and end within a setting, are there guidelines with regards to safeguarding?
Tash and Sam

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They were disappointed if nobody posted a comment on their blog. This was particularly distressing because of the knowledge of the size of the potential audience (p 113) (Also commented on in Glogoff)

Writing about a topic that a student doesn't know well, can change what seems like a friendly technology into a very threatening task. (Hurlburt, 2008).

Students who are unsure about exposing their work to the group, may also be timid about commenting (i.e. read, criticize) on their classmates' work. (Hurlburt, 2008)

They didn't really know how to respond to other people's ideas. (p 114)

Marking blogs is time consuming

Reading blogs can be tedious

Concern about predators on internet

If teachers don't give opportunities to bring the conversations in blogs back into the classroom - the conversations in blogs are no different to written assignments which are handed into the teacher to grade.

Many of the comments were similar, so they didn't know if they were being honest or just nice.

Didn't think blogs were effective because people just expressed their same idea on other people's blogs - they weren't actually responding.

Teachers not understanding the potential benefits for teaching and learning, engagement and motivation. Not having time to explore their pedagogical beliefs.

Teachers not understanding or willing to engage in the technology.

Pressure from parents who have only experienced the 'traditional' school - the way they were taught.

Schools not providing clear information to help parents understand the benefits and advantages.

Lack of professional development and time to explore 'new' learning, therefore there is no 'buy in' from teachers in the implementation of blogs in their classrooms.

Lack of enough technology to support blogging in the classroom.

Other technology issues - internet connection and speed, age of the technology, etc.

Teachers unwilling to share 'part of themselves' in an open environment. High level of trust needed.

Teachers feeling that they have to have something 'profound' to share, otherwise it's not worth sharing.

Expectation that they need to be 'experts' in what they are blogging about.

Fear of being judged by others.

'Competition' factor - feeling that their blogs need to have as much of the 'wow' factor as other blogs.

Manageability of reading the posts, commenting on them and giving feedback to their students while maintaining their own blogs.

Some students actually think blogging is more casual than traditional formal writing. (p112)

Blogging may have encouraged a different, less formal, writing voice.(p112), which could result in less focused writing and editing (p. 117)

Technical problems were a challenge for some student s as well.for example, delays in approing new posts, multiple posting or being riddled with advertisements.

Students had problems accessing other students' blogs (p.114)

Skills must be taught not assumed that they are known just because the students are surrounded by technology. They need to learn how to question, participate in an online community, provide feedack. (Reingold, 2006 in Zawilinski, 2009)

Students have not been taught how to provide feedback to others, how to question for deeper thinking.

Time not given in class, or at home, to be able to read and respond to feedback and other blog posts.

Keyboarding / general computer skills may not be as efficient. (This is a difficulty that can be solved given time to practise and the expectation to blog)

For Teachers

See Pedagogy [Ellison and Wu] about guidance required in giving feedback and ethical questions about students' digital persona extending into the future.

School administrators need to know where the school's authority for blogs begins and ends (concerns over comments posted on student blogs)
Lai and Chen (2011)

Organizing and compiling content for the blog is time consuming

Teachers may have to spend more time answering student questions online than it would take them to explain in class

From General Discussions With Teachers

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They were disappointed if nobody posted a comment on their blog. This was particularly distressing because of the knowledge of the size of the potential audience (p 113) (Also commented on in Glogoff) Writing about a topic that a student doesn't know well, can change what seems like a friendly technology into a very threatening task.

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Rachel and Iona

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I began writing a blog based on my doctoral research, about the lives of female offenders in Victorian England, in April 2012. In part, I created WaywardWomen so that I had a forum in which I could explore the themes and ideas of my thesis. It was my hope that writing a blog would help me become a better researcher, a better writer and a more thorough thinker.

Even more important than that, I hoped it would act as a space where I could share and discuss my research with others, be they fellow students, academics, or those with a more general interest in my topic. After all, in the face of a changing academy, university staff and students alike are acknowledging the necessity of raising awareness of their research, and promoting its merits, outside higher education.

My posts would typically examine a case study of one of the women I research, or explore a particular kind of crime that women were involved in. To my delight, in the year and a half of me posting, my blog did well, sharing my research with far more people than I could have ever hoped to reach in person, and allowing me to discuss and debate my ideas with people around the world.

In June this year I was sent a link to an article on a tabloid newspaper website titled Edwardian Rogues Gallery, by a friend and former lecturer, suggesting I might find it of interest. When I opened the article, I was surprised and horrified, to find a post I had published on my blog just weeks earlier staring back at me, with somebody else's name placed at the top. Worse still, I found the same post reproduced on other sites, under the name of more authors.

At first, my overriding emotion was that of disbelief. Although I knew that some news organisations were far from scrupulous in their reporting, I had always assumed this would stop short of reproducing others work without permission or acknowledgement. But after taking to Twitter to get some more opinions, I was saddened to hear that, yes, this can happen, and yes, it happens all the time.

Indignant, I resolved to contact those responsible. I emailed both the news agency that originally circulated the post and the two national newspapers, one regional title and global website that took it. I also tried several times to contact the individuals who had put their names above my work. These attempts were, of course, all in vain. Wherever I turned, I was met with a frustrating wall of silence. I soon realised the overwhelming likelihood that I would never get a response from anyone involved or be given any acknowledgement for my work. That is when I took the decision to partially shut down my blog.

I didn't want to. For over a year I had invested time into producing something I was proud of, and into promoting it at every opportunity. I couldn't bear the thought of removing it all, so I left a few posts, including the one in question, and a cautionary tale to other bloggers, on the site. I've not been back since.

Blogging provides a vital method of communication and networking for PhD students and early career researchers. Blogs can raise awareness of a researcher and their work in the early stages of a career, before they have a long list of publications, or grant applications behind them. But with an environment existing in which your research can be taken and used by others - for profit - without your permission, and without accreditation, is it a risk worth taking?

Unfortunately, there are few effective steps you can take to prevent similar plagiarism of your work. Having dwelt on it for some time, I don't think the reason my blog was reproduced without my consent was because I hadn't made it clear enough that I objected. Those responsible for exploiting academic blogs are professional and well practiced at their trade. Sadly, in the current climate, the best way to protect your ideas and your research would seem to be not explicitly sharing them with an unknown audience.

Although I restricted access to large parts of my blog, I didn't remove it. I have resolved, in time, to use it again - the opportunities and benefits blogging offered are just too good to good to pass up permanently. However, I have yet to work out what format my blogs might take, and what the content of my posts might be. Until something is done to confront the shameless exploitation of the work of early career academics, it can't be anything I mind losing.
Lucy Williams is studying for a PhD in history at the University of Liverpool - follow her on Twitter This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. Looking for your next university role? Browse Guardian jobs for hundreds of the latest academic, administrative and research posts @Lucy_E_Williams Topics

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I began writing a blog based on my doctoral research, about the lives of female offenders in Victorian England, in April 2012. In part, I created WaywardWomen so that I had a forum in which I could explore the themes and ideas of my thesis.

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This is a great read and explains the arguments against learning outcomes.

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"Professor Furedi, how do you get around learning outcomes?" a young lecturer asks me in a breakout session. I have just spent 10 minutes explaining the corrosive influence of learning outcomes on education to my audience at the recent Think Festival in The Hague. Nevertheless, I am caught off guard by my blunt questioner. That is probably why my reply is a bit more candid than I had intended it to be. "I just make them up and ignore them," I say.

I should not have been too surprised by the question. One week earlier, when I put forward the same argument to a group of PhD students and staff at the University of Birmingham, the predominant reaction to learning outcomes was also one of cynicism and contempt. After my lecture, a recently appointed lecturer in education sounded like Jean-Paul Sartre when he described how he and his colleagues managed the institutional expectation that learning outcomes should be taken seriously: "With bad faith," he chuckled. And bad faith is what the Quality Assurance Agency communicated in its 2007 report Outcomes from institutional audit: The adoption and uses of learning outcomes, when it boasted "that, despite differential rates of progress between and within institutions, the adoption of learning outcomes has been addressed with vigour". Only in passing did the report point out that it "is apparent that not all staff embraced the learning outcomes approach with equal enthusiasm"; a bit of an understatement. Vigour and enthusiasm are not sentiments that normal academics express towards learning outcomes.

There are, of course, many academics who tell me that life is too short to worry about every fad in higher education. Their advice to me is to go through the motions of being a good boy or girl and to simply copy someone else's learning outcomes. One Dutch computer studies lecturer explained to me that fortunately they have one colleague who "takes all this jargon seriously" and that he is more than happy to allow others to reproduce his wording.

So, although many academics regard the annual ritual of updating and specifying the learning outcomes in their module guide as a pointless performance, the role of this relatively recent innovation is rarely explicitly contested. Critics of learning outcomes frequently confine themselves to demanding a more flexible and less prescriptive approach towards the use of this tool and implicitly accept its legitimacy. And while in private conversation many academics dismiss the adoption of learning outcomes as an exercise in bureaucratic pedantry, such grumbles are indistinguishable from the numerous complaints about bureaucrats and administrators and rarely touch on the uniquely corrosive impact of the formalisation of learning outcomes on academic education.

On numerous occasions I have been told off by colleagues for making an issue of learning outcomes on the grounds that it merely requires a few minutes of cutting and pasting to produce them. Yet learning outcomes are not just another banal instrument deployed to monitor and quantify the achievements of students. The very purpose of this organisational instrument is to accomplish a shift in emphasis from learning to outcomes. This is a technique through which a utilitarian ethos to academic life serves to diminish what would otherwise be an open-ended experience for student and teacher alike. Those who advocate learning outcomes do so expressly with the aim of abolishing such experiences, which is why they so vociferously target anything that smacks of ambiguity. Oxford Brookes University 's statement on "Writing Aims and Learning Outcomes", for example, warns members of staff against using terms such as "know", "understand", "be familiar with", "appreciate" or "be aware of" because "they're not subject to unambiguous test".

The attempt to abolish ambiguity in course design is justified on the grounds that it helps students by clarifying the overall purpose of their programme and of their assessment tasks. No doubt the learning outcomes contained in module unit guides are a model of clarity. But it is a simplistic form of clarity usually associated with bullet points, summary and guidance notes. The precision gained through the crystallisation of an academic enterprise into a few words is an illusory one that is likely to distract students from the clarity that comes from serious study and reflection.

The problem with utilitarian education is not its single-minded addiction to what is useful - hopefully all academic subjects are of use - but its tendency to deprive teaching and learning of meaning. Its focus on the end product devalues the actual experience of education. When the end acquires such significance the means become subordinated to it. The adage that "the end justifies the means" captures the imperative of utilitarian higher education.

The University of Virginia counsels its academics to "describe what students are asked to do using action verbs". The exhortation is constantly repeated in different institutional guidelines. This rhetorical disdain for terms such as "appreciating" or "understanding" speaks to a pedagogic ethos that has become estranged from scholarship and the open-ended pursuit of ideas.

There are at least four compelling arguments against the use of learning outcomes in higher education.

First, they threaten to disrupt the conduct of the academic relationship between teacher and student. Every discipline has its own way of educating new cohorts of undergraduates. But even the hardest of the hard sciences requires that at least some of the time students should embark on a voyage of intellectual experimentation and discovery. Guiding students on such a quest demands that teachers are prepared to yield to new experience and are sufficiently flexible to forge relationships with students that are appropriate to the circumstances. The promise of certainty of learning outcomes violates relationships that are evolving in directions that are not always predictable.

Creativity cannot be foretold and students often develop their insight in ways that cannot be communicated to a predetermined formula. Instead of guiding, the ethos of learning outcomes encourages the imparting of information. Instead of a collaborative engagement, it favours a one-way dynamic rather than a dialogue. And what happens to those of us who are devoted to a Socratic orientation to teaching and believe that dialogue is not only a pleasant sounding cliche but is indispensable for gaining clarity and understanding? Since a dialogue cannot be a dialogue if its result is known in advance, the very notion of a learning outcome negates its spirit. This is not simply a minor defect of utilitarian pedagogy. Academics are not primary school teachers; they do not simply teach to impart information but because they, too, need the stimulation of questioning minds to flourish in their endeavour.

The second argument against learning outcomes is that they foster a climate that inhibits the capacity of students and teachers to deal with uncertainty. The attempt to clarify and render explicit the different dimensions of academic learning represents a futile attempt to gain certainty through relying on process. What is gained, however, is not clarity but rigidity. This is a problem of what Richard Hil in his lively book Whackademia: an Insider's Account of the Troubled University has characterised as the "rigidification of pedagogy". According to Hil, this "involves the attempt by teaching and learning experts and academics themselves to ensure a largely pre-determined approach to learning - one that is linked directly to 'learning objectives' set out in unit information guides".

The rigidification and standardisation of pedagogy attempts to artificially bypass the problem posed by the indeterminacy of know-ledge and understanding. Yet a serious academic course is likely to raise issues that are complex and fluid and cannot be meaningfully distilled through the arbitrary act of inventing a learning outcome. This attempt to prescribe standardised outcomes invariably flattens out complexity and rewards those who have internalised template-speak.

The third argument against learning outcomes is that they devalue the art of teaching. The art of teaching depends on exercising judgement based on experience. At its best, it presupposes the capacity to respond to unexpected and unpredictable questions and problems that emerge in the course of a dialogue. It requires a willingness to extem-porise, change direction and even introduce issues and questions into the course that were not anticipated previously. But when teaching is constricted by what others think students should know at the end of the course, academics are spared the hassle of having to think for themselves.

The art of teaching also requires a readiness to treat different students differently. The more adventurous students will flourish only if they are let off the leash and given space to experiment. Learning outcomes inhibit this. Moreover the insights and experiences gained outside and beyond the learning outcomes are simply not recognised.

The fourth - and arguably most disturbing - consequence of the regime of learning outcomes is that it breeds a culture of cynicism and irresponsibility.

It is important to recall that the principal reason for the invention of learning outcomes was to hold academics and their institutions to account. As an integral component of auditing culture, advocates of learning outcomes claimed that through rendering the work of institutions more explicit, higher education would become more transparent and accountable. But, paradoxically, a method of organising education that has as one of its aims the institutionalisation of accountability fosters a climate of non-responsibility.

It is well known that the act of cobbling learning outcomes together represents a performance of impression management. As we have seen, academics receive guidelines that include a long list of words that they can use and ones that they cannot. These templates are than customised for the sake of appearances. But the very process through which learning outcomes are constructed involves an act of bad faith. Why? Because although the learning outcomes are formally authored by academics, the language and narrative used is scripted by agencies - so university courses are framed through a language that expresses values and organisational ideals that are external to their discipline. This would not be a problem if it were merely a matter of borrowing a terminology that served as an administrative convenience. The narrative through which learning outcomes are framed, however, seeks to distil a complex and necessarily open-ended dynamic into phrases that, even with the best will in the world, can never be more than platitudes.

This utilitarian ethos encourages irresponsibility because what matters is whether the formal outcomes have been achieved, not what students have actually experienced or learned. It promotes a calculating and instrumental attitude where responsibility becomes equated with box-ticking.

The issue of institutional dishonesty lies at the heart of the problem. Although promoters of learning outcomes frequently praise their alleged pedagogic benefits for students and teachers, it is necessary to recall that the motivation behind the invention of this instrument was that of a managerial convenience. More specifically, the motivation behind the language and narrative of learning outcomes was the exigency of holding academics to account. It was the aspiration to quantify and regulate higher education and not a problem integral to academic education that led to the institutionalisation of this regime. So what we have is a disciplinary instrument masquerading as a pedagogic one.

Can learning outcomes be redeemed? Critics who recognise the bureaucratic burdens imposed by the regime of outcomes have called for more flexibility. Others have criticised the "insensitive" use of this instrument and plea for a more "student-centred" approach. As a formal auditing instrument, however, learning outcomes cannot be anything other than formal and rigid. Nothing will be lost by getting rid of them.

If individual academics want to use learning outcomes, of course, that is their prerogative. But what we need is a genuinely pluralist academic culture where courses are taught in a manner that engages with issues that are integral to their discipline. Academics are grown-up people who do not need the language police to instruct them about what kind of verbs to use. And students should be treated as grown-ups who can be allowed to embark on a journey of discovery instead of directed to a predetermined destination.

The idiot's guide to writing learning outcomes
Intended learning outcomes are statements that predict what learners will have gained as a result of learning.
A 2002 paper, The Role and Integration of Learning Outcomes into the Educational Process by Paul Watson of Sheffield Hallam University, defines learning outcomes as "something that students can do now that they could not do previously...a change in people as a result of a learning experience".

Academics are asked to write learning outcomes for each course; they form part of the process of designing a course.

On its website, the University of Birmingham advises academics: "Your learning outcomes should specify the minimum acceptable standard for a student to be able to pass a module or course (threshold level). This means that it is important to express learning outcomes in terms of the essential learning for a module or course, so you should have a small number of learning outcomes which are of central importance, not a large number of superficial outcomes.

"We recommend that you aim for between four and eight learning outcomes for each of your modules, and up to 25 outcomes for an entire programme.

"Start programme outcomes with the phrase: 'A successful learner from this programme will be able to...'

"Start module outcomes with the phrase: 'On successful completion of the module, students will be able to...'

"Or, better still: 'On successful completion of the module, you will be able to...'"

Meanwhile the University of Glasgow 's guidance says: "Try to avoid using verbs like 'understand' or 'appreciate' or 'be familiar with'. Instead ask yourself what your students will be able to do if they understand 'x' and try to express this in the learning outcome. ILOs [intended learning outcomes] must express in operational terms what candidates should be able to demonstrate they can do for the purposes of assessment."

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"Professor Furedi, how do you get around learning outcomes?" a young lecturer asks me in a breakout session. I have just spent 10 minutes explaining the corrosive influence of learning outcomes on education to my audience at the recent Think Festival in The Hague. Nevertheless, I am caught off guard by my blunt questioner.

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After reading through Rachel's learning outcomes document, I found Bloom's Taxonomy Action Verbs. Thought they might be helpful for writing the learning outcomes.

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Hi
I found this guide to creating learning outcomes in higher education and found it quite useful. Thought I'd share!