Teaching for Quality at University

I pretty much now consider the main point of this blog is to track the books I've read, and how I felt about them. This book is the first of many I'll be reading for my PhD, so I'll talk a little about it.

Teaching for Quality at University, by John Biggs and Catherine Tang, is one of the definitive books about outcomes-based education. He talks about Constructive Alignment, which is a method for designing courses that aims to ensure that the the students are learning what you want them to learn - aligning teaching and assessment to the intended learning outcomes of the course. It's a very well written book, easy to understand and follow. Academic writing is often poor, focused on accuracy rather than readability, so this was a pleasant surprise.

I chose this as my first book to read (my PhD supervisor has given me a list), because the Medical Program that most of my day job is about recently redesigned its curriculum, building the curriculum around Learning Objectives (which is our way of saying "Intended Learning Outcomes"). It has really helped me understand with more clarity what we're doing (I'm employed mainly as software designer, not educational designer, so my former ignorance on the topic is not as outrageous as on might at first think).

Great book; I'll probably have to read it again sometime, when I've learnt more about everything else related to learning.

Conan the Champion

More Conan is always good for one's health. Conan the Champion, by John Maddox Roberts, it surprisingly good. I picked it up on the assumption that it was yet more mass-produced junk extruded from the vast Conan novel grinding machine they've got hidden away somewhere that takes raw beef and steel and turns them into a Authentic Barbarian-With-Rippling-Muscles Flavoured Product, but this was better than that. Certainly an improvement over Mercenary.

In this tale, Conan is shipwrecked at the start of winter in the northern reaches of the Vilayet Sea, and is stuck with nothing to do over winter, so he heads off to seek the employment of one of the local petty kings. Demons are encountered, battles fought, epic deeds done. The local northern tribes are nicely barbaric, done in the true style of a Robert E Howard barbarian tribe. There's a rather silly interlude in an alternate dimension that appears to be little more then filler, but other than that the story flows quite well. Apparently Roberts said in an interview that his publishers keep making him extend the length of his novels, and there are definitely a couple of parts that seem to have been thrown in to pad out the story and don't add much at all to the overall plot.

If I see more of Roberts' Conan novels, I will certainly pick them up - this was quite entertaining.

The Once and Future King

The Once and Future King is quite an epic book; the tale of the life of Arthur and those around him. But rather than a biographical style tale, it's the tale of Arthur's moral development, and his quest for the idea of a moral form of government.

The quote from the New York Times reviewer on the back cover is very apt - "A glorious dream of the Middle Ages as they never were but as they should have been". Mighty knights and quests and the holy grail and bravery and justice and love fill this bittersweet tragedy. In the beginning Arthur is a child, then a young man the small world of his guardian Sir Ector's castle and estate, and Merlin arrives to be Arthur's tutor. This warm and humourous start to the story becomes tinged with sadness and bitterness as the story progresses, and Arthur discovers his true purpose and tries to bring justice to the violent and thuggish world he was born into.

It's a powerful book, and a telling of the tale of Arthur that changes one's conception of the tale entirely.

There was something about the copy of the book that I read that added to the experience. It's the same edition as the one linked above, but it's very worn and beaten up; it is split in half, with several pages in the middle sitting loose, broken away from the spine. This gave the book a feeling of great antiquity; almost a sense that I was reading an artifact from the time of Arthur himself. To prevent further damage this book needed to be handled with an almost reverent care; this certainly added to the experience. As I move towards e-books and a more digital life, it makes me wonder if I'll be losing more than I thought I would by leaving paper behind. Having said that, while writing this review, I was able to pop open iBooks and download Le Mort d'Arthur by Malory, which is referenced often in The Once And Future King, occasionally quite amusingly.

In any case, this is a book certainly worth reading. If possible read it in larger doses than I did (one chapter per night - there are many chapters), so that you can a deeper sense of what is going on.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

My dear reading public, I'm sure that both of you are becoming rather concerned about the quality of my reading, so I thought I'd raise the tone a little bit by finally getting around to reading a classic that I've meant to read for years, The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde.

It's a story that's part of the fabric of our culture; I can't remember a time when I didn't know the basic premise of this book - that a vain young man has a portrait painted which takes on the consequences of his sin and depravity, so that he remains young and breathtakingly handsome, while the person in the picture ages and becomes hideous, and displays the evidence of all his sins.

Ten years ago Jen and I went to Egypt, and saw the Pyramids, among other things. Everyone knows what the pyramids look like, and probably can't remember the first time they saw them; they've just Always Known. But going there, I was absolutely blown away by their grandeur, by how simply colossal they were. The Picture of Dorian Gray is like that; it's far better than you'd imagine it to be.

For starters, it's frequently hilarious. Wilde is famous for his witty epigrams, but the sheer volume of them in this book is staggering. Several time I had to put the book down and just sit there, laughing. The writing is lyrical and delightful throughout. It shows that for a language slapped together by germanic peasants and invading French thugs, English can be breathtakingly beautiful.

As an aside, I just did a Google search for a page of quoted to link you off to, but the pages out there on the interwebs really don't do justice to the novel. There are some deliciously spiky barbs that are frequently quoted, but it's a book you can flip to any page and be lost in the language.

One thing I found is that I can't read it without hearing it in Stephen Fry's voice. It's not just that he played Wilde in the 1997 movie; Fry really is a modern reincarnation of Wilde. I don't know that it was a bad thing, since Stephen Fry's voice is probably the ideal way to hear Wilde's characters speak. He has in fact put out at least one audiobook of Wilde's short stories; I'm sure there are, or will be, more.

This is a book that is worth reading. Don't be put off by knowing the premise, or even the ending. There's much more to the book than the basic plot points and some witty quotes. Go, get it now. Heck, you can download it for free.

Conan the Mercenary

I promise I didn't read two trashy Conan books in a row. Honestly, I didn't. I've just been in the mode of reading several books in parallel, in different parts of the house, and it so happened that I completed this one before I finished the other one I started before I started this one. Really, I did.

In any case, Conan the Mercenary, by Andrew J Offutt, seems to be from an extended series of knockoff Conan books that may have stemmed from L Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter's series - Buccaneer is listed in the "also in this series" list in the front of the book. In any case, if the Conan subgenre is literary junk food, then this one is fried pizza. It's not awful, but it certainly lacks a lot of the subtle power that makes Howard's or Robert Jordan's Conan tales shine. Relative to those, and even to the de Camp/Carter novel, this one is rather lacklustre.

It's actually two linked shorter stories; in the first Conan tries to steal from a sorcerer, and ends up with something of his own stolen; in the second one he comes into the employ of a noble lady in an eastern kingdom, in order to get back what he lost to the sorcerer. He defeats another bad guy who has been aided by a sorcerer.

Sorcerers in Conan stories seem to be always a little dull. They're two-dimensional bad guys with magic and an insatiable lust for power. I've always wanted a little more to them. The warriors are much more interesting - flawed but likable characters with some depth to them. I feel shortchanged after Conan goes up against a sorcerer - whether he wins of loses, it seems that there should have been more. More of what, I don't know. But more.

So this one I'd rate as only for the real Conan fans. Otherwise, skip it. The advantage you have with Conan over something like the Flashman Papers is the near limitless supply of reading material. I was immensely disappointed when I read the last Flashman novel and knew that there would be no more, but at least with Conan, there seems to be a good few shelf-metres of reading material to go through before I run out.