Tsars and Commissars week 3

Lecture:  Went well, although a little short.  Possibly a little dense, but a difficult topic to deal with in a wildly different manner (Bismarck’s alliance system and Russia).  Would have benefited from me editing the graphical representation to English from German.   More students with powerpoint printoffs this week

Seminars:  Good disucssions, although possibly too large/conceptual a topic for students to get into in much depth in the time available (Anglo-Russian conflict in the second half of the 19th Century).  General haziness regarding geography.
One group had the first presentation which was fairly good.  From the peer assessment it is clear that not all students understand why a ceratin mark should be awarded - some very high marks were given that did not match with the critique well and one wasn quite harsh markwise although comments suggested that the opinion was higher.  In the end the student was awarded a mark which I would have given them anyway.

Podcasts: popular and not impacting on attendance

100 word exercises: going well.  Good response rate and helping seminar discussion.  Topic did lead to a focus on Afghanistan with the neglect of some other areas from some students.  Some students say they need to get into the habit of remembering they need to submit until very close to the deadline (an argument for introducing this earlier than levle 3)

Reading: some students say they are struggling to get hold of books in the library.  when probed further they were unaware of being able to use other libraries in Bristol or the inter-library loan system.  A few complained about the high price of textbooks, and slow lead times from Amazon.  I suggested strategies for dealing with this (such as buying books together, finding secondhand books etc), and pointed out that there are copies of the textbooks for this course available in several bookshops in Bristol (Blackwell’s at UWE Frenchay and Waterstone’s in The Galleries)