Merton Fellows win Teaching Awards
Three Merton Fellows were honoured at November's 2013-14 Teaching Awards ceremony:
Fellow in Politics Dr Sergi Pardos-Prado was presented with a Social Sciences Teaching Excellence Award, for his "teaching style and depth of interaction with students"; this included contributing to the revival of a PPE reading group, introducing PPE talks at Merton, and designing and conducting study skills and essay writing sessions for Freshers. His student evaluations, past student performance, the materials used in his lectures at the Department, and the depth of feedback sent to undergraduate students were also taken into consideration.
A Classics Faculty team led by Tutor in Ancient History Dr Jonathan Prag were awarded a grant for their project Digital techniques in the study of ancient epigraphy: transforming MSt/MPhil teaching. The project aims to develop and embed the teaching of two essential digital technology-based skills into Masters-level training in epigraphy, and will put Oxford at the forefront of epigraphic training, enabling the team to directly integrate epigraphic teaching with current and future research projects. Graduates will learn the skills involved in both these techniques, and be able to exploit the rapidly growing body of digital resources in epigraphy for their research, thus giving them ideal preparation for participating in and developing future research.
The grant will support the costs of a workshop in the first year of the project, which will provide training for students in the use of TEI-XML (Epidoc) for edition inscriptions in digital format, and help prepare faculty members to deliver this teaching in future years. Dr Prag, and team members Dr Charles Crowther, and Dr Hannah Cornwell are all directing or involved in projects that currently record inscriptions in this way, and hope to involve the students in these as part of the overall project:
- Dr Prag is developing I.Sicily, a project to catalogue online all the inscriptions on stone from Ancient Sicily, in all languages, which is due to go live in late 2015. You can follow the project's progress on Facebook and Twitter.
- Dr Crowther is co-investigator on the Corpus of Ptolemaic Inscriptions Project.
- Dr Cornwell is a researcher on the Ashmolean Latin inscriptions project (AshLI)
And a Saïd Business School team that includes Tutor in Management Studies Dr Kate Blackmon (currently serving as the University's Senior Proctor) were presented with a 2013 Social Sciences Division Project Award, for a project to develop and enhance the undergraduate experience through the use of interactive keypads—'clickers'—in teaching.
