About
Terry Wassall
Principal Teaching Fellow
School of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Leeds
West Yorkshire
England
I have been interested in the potential of IT to enhance and add flexibility to teaching and learning since 1984 when I did a post graduate teaching certificate at Huddersfield Polytechnic in Yorkshire after graduating and obtaining a Doctorate in Sociology at the University of Leeds. Since then I have been involved in a series of projects over a number of years to introduce and support on-line teaching and learning across the Leeds University with staff in all the Faculties. I am currently managing a 2 year project to roll out and develop the use of our newly acquired VLE, Blackboard, in my Faculty, Education, Social Science and Law.
Increasingly over the last 3 or 4 years I have become interested in educational and learning issues that go beyond the boundaries of formal educational institutions. These interests can be briefly encapsulated under the headings of life long learning, the ‘expert’ learner, vicarious and informal learning processes and digital citizenship. To this end I am looking in depth at discussions and implementations of e-portfolios and personal and social learning environments (PLEs and SLEs) with a particular focus on open source applications and free (or inexpensive) hosted web applications. These freely available applications and web services enable individuals, interest groups and organisations of all sizes to put together an on-line environment that integrates communication tools and resources that have many of the strengths of institutional managed virtual learning environments without the costs and institutional control and ownership. I am also working with colleagues and students to enhance the connections between the research, scholarship and teaching activities in the School and develop discussions and strategies for the creation of personal learning and research environments.
Currently my teaching is at both undergraduate and post graduate level. The specific topics are, the Sociology of the Environment, Social Science Research Methods, and Sociological Theory.