Skip to main content

Dr Briony Birdi awarded faculty prize for Outstanding Practice in Learning and Teaching

Dr. Briony Birdi was awarded a Faculty of Social Science prize for, "Outstanding Practice in Learning and Teaching" on Tuesday, 18th October. Presented by Professor Paul Latreille, Deputy Pro-Vice Chancellor for Learning and Teaching, the nomination read, "Briony is an outstanding, inspiring teacher who is highly respected by both staff and students. She consistently attracts glowing comments in student module evaluations and motivates students to produce exemplary work. Briony’s commitment and determination to provide the highest quality teaching interventions enthuses her colleagues. Her conviction to providing meaningful opportunities for 'engaged learning' underpins Briony's teaching and facilitation of co-curriculum activities that develop students' interpersonal skills, empathy and cultural awareness."


In response to receiving this award, Briony had this to say: 'I'm so pleased to have been given this award, and I want to thank all the colleagues who have helped me to adapt my teaching approach over the years, and of course all the students who continue to be such excellent participants in the initiatives I develop, many of them entirely voluntarily: I do appreciate the time they have all taken to test my ideas, and to work with me in developing modules that are both interesting and useful for their academic and professional development.'

'It's my view that although classroom teaching alone may give our students the essential grounding they need for their future careers, with a vocational discipline such as Library and Information Science we need to combine the more standard teaching approaches with something more ‘outward-facing’. Because of this I have always tried to adopt an 'engaged' approach to my learning and teaching, to make sure that students are given regular opportunities not only to hear from practitioner experts as a core part of the curriculum, but also to participate in active debate with such experts via e.g. panel discussions during offsite sessions, practical workshops involving practitioner input, and small-scale research projects to solve a ‘real world’ problem.'

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Raspberry Pi Weather Project now live

A project to create a raspberry pi weather station is currently live in the Information School.  The Sheffield Pi weather station has been created by Romilly Close, undergraduate Aerospace Engineering student at the University of Sheffield.  The project was funded by the Sheffield Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) scheme and is being supervised by Dr Jo Bates, Paula Goodale and Fred Sonnenwald from the Information School. Information about the Sheffield Pi station and how to create your own can be found on the project website .  You can also see live data from the Sheffield Pi station on Plot.ly , and further information can also be found on the Met Office Weather Observations Website .    This work compliments the School’s existing project entitled ‘The Secret Life of a Weather Datum’ which explores socio-cultural influences on weather data.  This project is funded under the AHRC’s Digital Transformations Big Data call.  It aims to pilot a new approach to im
Post a Comment
Read more

Our Chemoinformatics Group wins Jason Farradane Award

The Information School's Chemoinformatics Research Group has been awarded the 2012 UKeiG Jason Farradane Award , in recognition of its outstanding 40 year contribution to the information field. The prize is awarded to the three current members of the group,  Professor Val Gillet , Dr John Holliday and Professor Peter Willett . The judges recognised the Group's status as one of the world's leading centres of chemoinformatics research, a major contributor to the field of information science, and an exemplar in raising the profile of the information profession. The School has a long association with the Farradane prize. Its second recipient was long time member of staff Professor Mike Lynch in 1980.
Post a Comment
Read more

Professor Mike Thelwall gives inaugural lecture

Professor of Data Science Mike Thelwall recently gave his inaugural lecture at the University of Sheffield, entitled  How helpful are AI and bibliometrics for assessing the quality of academic research? The lecture, delivered in the University's Diamond building, was introduced by Head of the Information School Professor Briony Birdi. It covered Mike's research into whether Artificial Intelligence can inform - or replace - expert peer review in the journal article publication process and what this could look like, as well as to what extent bibliometrics and citation statistics can play a role in assessing the quality of a piece of research. Mike also discussed whether tools like ChatGPT can accurately detect research quality. The inaugural lecture was well attended by colleagues from around the University.
Post a Comment
Read more