By Ian Dobson. For at least the last quarter century, policies designed to widen access to and participation in higher education have been largely predicated on notions of proportional representation or ‘changing the balance of the student population to reflect more closely the composition of society as a whole’ (Department of Employment Education and Training, 1990, p. 2). More...
By Ian Dobson. Michael Calver's recent exhortation 'Please don't aim for a highly cited paper' (AUR, 57(1): pp. 45-49) is welcome and a timely reminder of the problems associated with seeking citations at any cost. While not disagreeing with the concerns he raises we offer another way of looking at citation-seeking; thereby outlining a reconsideration of its purpose. We suggest that citations indirectly help to shape the terrain of a discipline. More...
By Ian Dobson. Some years ago, Pierre Bourdieu (2003, p. 21) reflected that academia, was a failing ‘edifice of critical thought’ and ‘in need of reconstruction’. He saw a global hegemony of neoliberal ideas emerging largely unscathed by critique from these increasingly isolated enclaves. More...
By . Back in 2009, King’s College London took the then courageous step to begin an Undergraduate Summer School. It was a leap in the dark and we started from nothing. At the time, the expectation was, quite unsurprisingly, that this was mainly going to be a programme for the North American market to suit their study abroad needs. In that first year our most important course was Shakespeare in London. Much has changed since then. More...
A home is meant to be a safe and secure shelter for individuals and families, fulfilling the basic need to have a roof over your head. Yet a home is also a tradable asset, an investment from which there’s potentially big money to be made, or to be lost as the global financial crisis has shown us. More...
The perennial curmudgeon H.L. Mencken is famously misquoted as saying: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” The ability to simplify is of course one of our strengths as humans. More...
In 2016, surprisingly for many, Oxford Dictionaries chose as their Word of the Year “post-truth”, an adjective defined as: “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. This runs contrary to the main tenet of the OECD, the “house of best practices” whose works and analysis depend on high quality statistics and solid empirical evidence. More...
Si le seul argument pour promouvoir alphabétisation est la joie que procurent les livres, alors on passe à côté du public des jeunes hommes en formation professionnelle. Voir l'article...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 25 Years Without a Raise
Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed, 2017/02/22
Adjunct instructors at Youngstown State University threw themselves a party this week to mark 25 years without a pay increase. More...
By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Looking (again) to Domain of One’s Own
Martha Burtis, The Fish Wrapper, 2017/02/22
It's good to see a look at a project some time after it has launched and some time after it has (largely) passed into new hands and new ownership. More...
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