Guest Lecture - Professor David Warner

The lecture we received from Professor Warner was one that I will remember for a long time, mainly because of his peculiar sense of humor or his slightly Victorian style of presentation, expecting the wooden ruler to slam on the table at any second kept me 100% concentrated throughout.

Having said this it did turn out to be a very interesting lecture as he discussed several issues, summarizing higher education. He began with a form of quiz, by initially putting a shortlist of different university's on the power point slide and asking us to categorize them from oldest to youngest. To my surprise when he revealed the answer it turned out that the Trinty campus Lampeter was in fact one of the oldest in Britain when I expected that to be one of the more recently formed University's. He then went on to discuss the diversity in higher education and some recent key legislation for example the education reform act, the further and higher education act and the teacher and higher education act. Again this is an area of education that I was very unaware of and it was interesting to gather this knowledge and see how everything has progressed over the years.

 The most interesting part for me however is when he went on to discuss the Swansea Metropolitan and where we fit into this picture. How we are in fact one of the newest and oldest universities in Britain, and also the comparison between us and Swansea University and how we are different. He finished with two controversial issues with why do we go to university? and why the student fees? where the money and jobs seem to be equally as good in areas of trade.

This lecture was in fact one of my favorite yet as Professor David Warner was able to transfer the information in good humor and in a way that made an area of education that would possibly be less interesting than others seem compelling.