By Anonymous academic. Academic work offers much more flexibility and freedom than other jobs.
Let's get the caveats out of the way. There are structural problems in the academic workplace, and as other contributors to the Academics Anonymous blog attest, many seem to be getting worse, not better. More...
By Daisy Buchanan. A new postdoc seeks to fund biology research that has been overlooked because of gender bias. Daisy Buchanan says the way we learn about men, women, animals and plants could be about to change forever. Read more...
By David Kent. Paid parental leave is absolutely essential if we want to retain the best and brightest minds in academia. Paid parental leave is the bare minimum of what should be provided for highly trained researchers with PhDs and it has instead become one of the hot button issues for early career researchers. One of the most stressful aspects of being a postdoctoral fellow is the lack of security and the financial instability. This can be absolutely crippling once you introduce babies into the mix. Postdocs tend to survive on short term contracts, fellowships or grants and are often frantically trying to figure out where next year’s paycheck will come from. A repeated refrain here at the Black Hole is that postdoctoral status in Canada is notoriously uncertain. More...
By Michael Plaxton. Robert Buckingham was a tenured professor and executive director of the University of Saskatchewan’s School of Public Health. He was fired on Wednesday, after publicly speaking his mind about the University’s decision to collapse the School into the Department of Medicine – part of the academic prioritization process known as TransformUS. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. An Alternative Perspective on Group Dynamics
Jenny Mackness.
In this post Jenny Mackness offers a rethink on the need for group formation. "How could it ever be right to not support the weakest member of the group? ... There were some lovely people in our walking group who shared these values, but also some who didn’t seem to understand that in a situation such as walking the West Highland Way, commitment to the group was important." It's an interesting challenge. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. “In Over Our Heads” – My Simmons commencement address
David Weinberger, Joho the Blog.
David Weinberger hits the mark with this talk about information overload. We don't feel overloaded by the effects of 1.3 million apple pie recipes or 7.6 million cute cat photos. Why not? Because we're not expected to master them. But with information it's different, because there used to be so much less that we could master all the information. But not any more. "We’re all in over our heads. Forever. This isn’t a temporary swim in the deep end of the pool. Being in over our heads is the human condition." But hey - that's a good thing. More...
Blog Educpros de Laurent Carraro. La croissance française souffre de la mauvaise santé globale de son appareil productif et du manque de confiance de la société en l’avenir de son industrie. Les causes de la désindustrialisation de notre pays sont complexes et multiformes. Parmi celles-ci, il en est une trop souvent négligée et pourtant essentielle : la capacité des jeunes à avoir confiance en l’industrie de demain. L’avenir se construit avec ces générations-là. Si les entreprises d’aujourd’hui portent la responsabilité immédiate de l’avenir industriel du pays, nous avons, en tant qu’établissement de l’Education nationale, de l’Enseignement supérieur et de la Recherche, la mission de préparer les nouvelles générations à intégrer et développer ce secteur. Suite...
By . Most colleges and universities today provide the educational equivalent of enterprise software.
You remember buying enterprise software. It was a big-ticket item that you had to customize and implement. And then every couple of years you’d need to upgrade to the new version. But Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies changed all that. Businesses can now “rent” software per user per month, and vendors have unbundled their offering into component parts so that customers only need to buy what they need. More...
By Wagdy Sawahel. The pace of global change in the higher education sector has been so fast and transformational in recent years that the sector’s usual responses will not suffice. Transformational responses are required to stay ahead of the game, particularly in the area of student engagement and retention. Read more...By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Conceptual Connections, once again
Matthias Melcher, x28’s new Blog.
Concepts can form networks, says Matthias Melcher. "Words can change each other’s subtle nuances, for example when a newer word gradually displaces an older one from a certain meaning, while the older word slowly shifts its connotations, just by being used differently." I don't inherently disagree with this. I was pretty careful in my statement to allow for non-causal changes of state: "can cause or result in..." - and the purpose was precisely allow that networks could be formed by non-physical entities. More...
/https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
