Foreign Perspectives

Saturday saw the first of the tutorials for DES212 and, as is the norm for this course, was a face to face tutorial.

Not only are there face to face tutorials but there are lots of them as the three tutors are operating a cluster tutorial system which means that they are each covering different topics and essentially there are almost three times the usual number to go to. So, instead of a gap of six weeks or so, the next one is next week and by a different tutor on a different topic.

Attendance was a bit low considering the cluster group but six was a good number for the session giving us each quite a high level of attention yet avoiding that “on the spot” feeling when the group is too small. With the session being largely on the scientific method we had quite a thought provoking exercise on how we might develop an experimental study. The small group size allowed the tutor to pull out a number of issues from our different approaches to the task and he knit that very neatly into the overall session. As usual with psychology, the gender balance was very distorted with five women and me.

Next up was a longer session stemming from a short exercise but moving on to cover in some detail how we should approach the argument in the essay in our first assignment. To incorporate all the suggestions would be quite a major undertaking but by spinning it out over several weeks,
I hope to at least attempt to do that.

Style-wise, I was very impressed at the breadth and depth of knowledge of the tutor and the apparent ease with which he incorporated our work within the tutorial. Moreover, he kept going at quite a pace for the entire time.