Oct
28
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When TheUniversityBlog itself is not enough...
Oct
15
“Advice Needs to Mean Something. Advice needs to have the possibility of being wrong. It needs to suggest one thing at the expense of something else. And, when the evidence is mixed, it should polarize some people to agree and others to object strongly. If advice can’t be wrong, it doesn’t mean anything at all.”
Scott H Young, Why I Hate Self-Help Platitudes
Students: Stand Up to Climate Change!
Taylor Garrett describes how coal power works and explains that everything we buy and use has some cost to the environment.
“we cannot claim to be fulfilling our responsibility to develop graduates capable of high-level critical inquiry if their contact time merely comprises listening to us in lectures and then listening to us in conversation with the most able and most vocal in seminars.
We cannot claim that we are offering students a high-quality experience if we leave them to develop and practise the most advanced skills of independent inquiry on their own. We must be as open to change and as innovative as we expect our students to be, and consider what the least confident learner is doing in every class-contact hour. How does that activity develop their graduate attributes? If they are not spending the time with us in activities that contribute directly to developing these attributes - if we are providing a baseline of knowledge and leaving all else to some mysterious process of “independent learning” - we are abdicating responsibility for achieving the primary goal of higher education teaching.” Mary Malcolm at University of Abertay Dundee on nurturing critical minds.
We cannot claim that we are offering students a high-quality experience if we leave them to develop and practise the most advanced skills of independent inquiry on their own. We must be as open to change and as innovative as we expect our students to be, and consider what the least confident learner is doing in every class-contact hour. How does that activity develop their graduate attributes? If they are not spending the time with us in activities that contribute directly to developing these attributes - if we are providing a baseline of knowledge and leaving all else to some mysterious process of “independent learning” - we are abdicating responsibility for achieving the primary goal of higher education teaching.” Mary Malcolm at University of Abertay Dundee on nurturing critical minds.
“No one has ever told [students] that study at undergraduate level is basically a matter of demonstrating that you’ve read and understood the relevant literature.
They are afraid that if they own up to their whole essay being composed of sources by experts in the field, they’ll convict themselves of unoriginality – not realising that originality is not required at undergraduate level. What is required is a mastery of sources by experts in the field. Thus we have the tragi-comic situation where, instead of showing off the research they have done, they are actually concealing it.” Brandon Robshaw explains that plagiarism would happen less if students realised how good it is to reference and quote from other sources. From The Independent, 15 October 2009
They are afraid that if they own up to their whole essay being composed of sources by experts in the field, they’ll convict themselves of unoriginality – not realising that originality is not required at undergraduate level. What is required is a mastery of sources by experts in the field. Thus we have the tragi-comic situation where, instead of showing off the research they have done, they are actually concealing it.” Brandon Robshaw explains that plagiarism would happen less if students realised how good it is to reference and quote from other sources. From The Independent, 15 October 2009
“A single-bedroom London flat with no bath and a cupboard-sized kitchen is being offered to students for £548 a week. The flat, which costs £28,000 a year, is owned by Unite Group, the UK’s largest student-housing firm, a company endorsed by University College London. The sky-high price was reported on 11 October, and led to criticism from student leaders. Ben Whittaker, vice-president for welfare at the National Union of Students, said: ‘It is often more profitable for private landlords to supply high-end housing for the very few. Universities, responsible for making affordable accommodation available to all students, should take this more seriously.’”
From Times Higher Education, 15 October 2009
Oct
9
“Universities are going to have to reconsider the whole function of HE, how we better blend together research and teaching, how we look at new models of undergraduate education. I’m very keen to try to ensure that those who come out of British universities are much more broadly based in their skills, are able to be competent in areas that involve both literacy and numeracy and be much better rounded citizens than tend to be produced by universities that focus very narrowly on single disciplinary subjects.”
Malcolm Grant, president and provost of UCL, speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme.
Oct
8
Students at the University of Quebec in Montreal do a great job of creating a one-take video to the Black Eyed Peas song, “I Gotta Feeling”.
Academia and Web 2.0: More work needed?
An article in Research Information suggests that academia hasn’t taken hold of the opportunities available from Web 2.0 tools (social network sites, blogging, wikis, and so on):
“Unfortunately there are few signs that academics are really embracing the new opportunities offered by Web 2.0. Many academics’ idea of online collaboration is still emailing the findings they have arrived at independently to one another, while their notion of an innovative method of promoting research results is the obligatory ‘project web site’. Such sites usually offer little more than a description of the project, a list of the partners, and possibly some photographs of awkward-looking academics standing around at kickoff meetings. It is true that the more adventurous may embrace a rarely-updated project blog or project wiki. However, overall these online elements are generally rather stale affairs, reflecting researchers going through the boxticking motions rather than embracing the true potential of web technologies.”
Is the author being overly harsh, or do they make a good point? Give the article a read and see what you think.
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