two point xhosa

Apparently ttpo# got a shout out all the way over in South Africa earlier in the month at the Higher Education as a Social Space Conference. Many thanks to Angela Brew for mentioning us favourably in her keynote speech.

Thanks to Physio 2.0 for the above photo.

Added Slidecast to the ttpo# LTEA Presentation

theatre two point oh # @ LTEA 2008

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: of university)

Evaluation via Skype

Having now graduated from University, both Laura and I have been busy moving down the M1 to our new abodes in London... but still with the final evaluation of ttpo# to complete. Now that the dust has settled we're entering the final stages of the project and have been putting together the final evaluation report and case study - drawing upon a focus group with participants held in June and a reflective interview of Laura and me from August. It was probably apt that the latter was conducted by Jamie over Skype, using the excellent plugin Callgraph to record the conversation for transcription.


Although I can't say it was a conscious choice to take some time out before completing the project, it has been good to get some perspective and to be able to take a fresh look at what has (and hasn't) been achieved. Some of the things said by participants have been really insightful - interestingly many of them seemed to think that with a normal academic module (or with a "normal" theatre play) you get told what to do a lot more. Other comments were slightly more... philosophical... ("it was led by dreams").

What was good was that for most of the transcript the group doesn't mention either Laura or my name - we hope that this indicates that they really did feel ownership over the project, and didn't think of this as being somehow "ours". This said, there was one slightly worrying reference to us as "mummy and daddy".

I was particularly glad to see that most thought that, despite being incredibly time-intensive, it had not adversely impacted on their studies or exams. In fact some felt the opposite, and it certainly seems this way given some of the excellent results many of the graduates received. Most seem keen to want to continue their involvement with theatre, and there seems to be a consensus that it was a very worthwhile experience.

As a final note for this post, I'm also finally getting round to converting all the hours of video recordings to avi - ready to edit into the DVD we promised! We should also be able to upload the video to these here pages, so at this rate we may be finished by Christmas...

Presenting ttpo#

Today Laura and I presented at the LTEA* Conference 2008: Inquiry in a Networked World. You can check out the slideshow of our paper at slidecast.

Theatre in (Higher) Education

With one foot in ttpo# and the other as CILASS Student Ambassador for French I went along to the Languages of the Wider Word CETL in London a couple of weeks ago for a day conference on Drama in Language Learning. Check out my post on the CILASS Student Blog for more info.

Evaluation, Evaluation, Evaluation...

The production is now entering its final stages: the performances are all done, the budgets are completed and everyone involved has been hard at work with essays, exams, and finally a chance to let their hair down.

However, now that we've all got a little bit of time to breathe, now that we have a bit of perspective on the project, it's time to start evaluating the whole process; as well as producing a case study and a final report, we have already run a focus group with many of our participants, and myself and Laura will be disseminating information about the project at several conferences, starting tomorrow with the Drama and Language Learning Day at the Languages of the Wider World CETL at SOAS/UCL.

We're also attending the Student Network Conference on Monday and Tuesday in Plynouth, and then presenting at the Learning Through Enquiry Alliance Conference 2008 at the end of the month back in Sheffield.

I'll also be posting more about the production and uploading podcasts and video over the next few weeks, now that I finally have my life back!

Two down, Two to go...

Well we're half way through the performances and have received some positive feedback. Things have been rather busy as you can imagine, so for now I'll just leave you with a seven minute interview on yesterday's Howard Pressman show on BBC Radio Sheffield - fast forward 2h45m in to check it out...