#Take5, a nationally successful Learning Development blog originally launched at London Met, in its 10th anniversary year has just celebrated the release of its 100th Edition.
Date: 14 March 2024
The Higher Education Learning Development Blog #Take5, which is celebrating its 100th edition, began life on 17 November 2014. It was created by Associate Teaching Professors Tom Burns and Sandra Sinfield as a user-friendly continuing professional development (CPD) blog for staff at London Metropolitan University. The blog was designed by Tom and Sandra to be a very user-friendly way of sharing - and learning about great practice.
Tom and Sandra’s active engagement with the Association of Learning Development in Higher Education (ALDinHE) led them to extend #Take5’s reach to Learning Developers everywhere - and to anyone interested and active in the development of student authentic and liberatory learning. #Take5 soon became the blog of the ALDinHE Professional Development Working Group - and is now under the aegis of the Mentoring Working Group.
The 100th edition was launched on a suitably special date, 29 February 2024, and as part of the centenary celebrations, ALDinHE reached out to their community asking for thoughts, reactions, and responses – and many are included in the celebratory 100th #Take5.
The hope was and is that the #Take5 blog performed a mentoring role, both through the gentle and positive sharing of good practices, and through the way that the blog editors, Sandra, Tom, and Katharine, help those writers who are new to blogging through their first blogging process.
Since the blogs started, Katharine Jewitt, as ALDinHE Admin gathered them together as a searchable cache of resources, and she is now a co-editor putting the final polish on all the posts.
Writing about Sandra and Tom’s impact, Sandra Abegglen of The University of Calgary said, “Tom Burns and Sandra Sinfield have supported me ever since I have entered academia, introducing me to creative and playful practice, and the values of learning development. Over the years, they have grown to be not only my colleagues, co-researchers, and writers, but friends. With their love for education, they have influenced many educational practitioners’ ‘doing’ and ‘thinking.’ Their enthusiasm for empowering teaching and learning is palpable in everything they do.”
Thanking their readership, Tom and Sandra said, “We wanted it to stand beside you as you thought about what you do and what you want to do in the classroom - and to help you shout about what you have done so that more of us learn about it. We want to help you to show off how great you are. Thank you to everybody who has written a blog post for #Take5 - and thank you to everybody who has read #Take5”.
You can read the inaugural and most recent editions of #Take5 on the wordpress blog: