Nothing particularly interesting

Thiong’o, N. wa. (1992). Decolonising the mind: the politics of language in African literature . London: James Currey.

I was recently asked to give recommendations to someone who wanted some grounding in educational theory.  I gave the fairly standard response – all the big names.  After which I was mortified to realise just how stupendously white and male my recommendations were.

Over the years I have had many different managers.  Some I have thought to be good, some bad - and some downright awful.  At UEL we have just appointed a new VC - and it will be interesting to see what happens - but one of the debates that always seems to emerge when new managers are appointed, is whether an educational manager need to be an experienced educator? Of course they should, one argument goes.  Anyone put in the position of deciding policies and practices within an educational institution needs to understand the roles, demands and challenges of those doing the actual job.  How can an educational manager have any clear understanding of the stakeholders in their business, if they have never been exposed directly to those stakeholders? Don't be ridiculous , says the other side, surely a good manager is one who knows how to find the right information to make the most effective decisions relating to those stakeholders?  A manager with no teaching...

Satire on corporate monopolies in 19th-century America, targeting a railway owner who once famously said "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." At my University we are currently discussing how to provide support for software that can help students and staff manage their references and sources.  There are of course many different options available on the market - some free, and some not.  During discussions I have made no secret of my preference for Zotero - which I believe offers the most intuitive and comprehensive functionality.  To this end, I have done some showcases of Zotero for various academics - which appear to illicit one of three responses from them: Oh, brave new world that has such software in it!  I had no idea - and I want it now! We already use it.  Have been for years.  So why are you telling us about it now? But don't we already have Mendeley in our official software catalogue? I fully expected ...

The other week I blogged about the myth that Moodle looks rubbish compared to for-profit VLE systems .  Along a similar vein, I have begun to wonder just how many people using Moodle realise the power they have right at the end of their typing digits?

It's TEF day .  A day that few people have really been looking forward to, mainly because there are unlikely to be many winner - but there sure as hell will be a lot of losers. When the whole TEF idea was announced, there were many aspects of it that I wholeheartedly supported.  The idea that Universities should be at least as concerned about their teaching quality as their research output was something that I cheered along with merrily.  Very quickly though, the whole plan became infected with compromises designed to over-simply a complex process by relying on just the data that already exists - rather than data actually designed to measure the very thing you are interested in. So. In just the same way that Ofsted can downgrade a school where pupils have a less than 100% attendance (thereby penalising schools that accept sick children), the TEF measures teaching excellence on the basis of: Dropout rates (penalising Universities committed to widening particip...

People working in low-paid jobs want more than just a pay rise from a degree The release of the Longitudinal Earnings Outcomes (LEO) always tends to cause groans and head-scratching among some academics.  The picture presented is a familiar one: Graduates who go for degrees in Business or Economics are more likely to earn bucket-loads, while those who go for Sociology will be - quite assuredly - not.  Those who teach courses on the lower-paid half of the scale suddenly begin to fear their courses will be closed down as a consequence. The problem is that when data like this is reported, it encourages us to think that salaries are more important to students than things like job security or job satisfaction - and this idea, I fear, is misleading.

It was interesting, but not entirely surprising to read Phil Hill's blog on e-Literate suggesting a dramatic slow-down in the take-up of Moodle in HE Institutions.  Not surprising because there seems to be a myth about Moodle that has always flickered in dark corners and is fanned into flame by for-profit LMS providers at the nearest opportunity. This myth is that Moodle looks rubbish. Other LMS providers set up a course content page filled with as many html5 gadgets as they can imagine, and compare it to the most basic topic-format Moodle page.  "There we are!" they declare, "Look how rubbish Moodle looks compared to our system!  And in the modern world where students are using tablets and mobile phones more and more, isn't it important that your University LMS looks smart and contemporary?" And so Universities look at these other LMS systems and think: 'Ooo, it has this, or it has that!  Our Moodle doesn't have them!'  Which in turn ...

Interesting reading this morning was Ant Bagshaw's article in WonkHE about Jo Johnson's encouragement for a more effective credit transfer system for Higher Education. In case you were unaware, a credit transfer system is the means by which you can study a course in one institution, and accumulate 'credits' from that course.  You can then transfer those credits to another institution and apply them to a course there. It's a great idea - it means that higher education can be studied more flexibly.  You can begin your degree in Lincoln, and should you then find yourself having to move house to Glasgow you can simply transfer your credits over and carry on studying.  One of the many benefits of an effective credit transfer is that it emphasises the extent to which Higher Education is seen as a cohesive whole within the UK, and how the national qualification for the UK nations align effectively with each other.  At the same time, things like the Bologna proces...

I can't sleep.  I have managed to wind myself up over the amount of seemingly ill-considered demands that keep flying the way of teaching staff in my College (the latest arriving at about 8pm this evening). The first was a grand announcement that in order to save money on actual teaching time, we were all expected to create online activities instead - which would replace teaching hours, thereby freeing us all up to teach more modules.  Like a kind of MOOCAC (Massively Open Online Course At Cost). Ok. But they were more specific than that.  It was to take the form of an hour's online activity each week for each module.  Since we are currently teaching the equivalent of around 8-10 modules per semester (likely to go up to 12 or more with the hours freed up by this wheeze), this means we could be developing around 144 different hour-long online activities per semester. Starting this September. Oh and there is no money to pay for any preparation time ...

My letter to MP Dame Angela Watkinson

Just a wee detour - a small coffee-break from my current obsession with marking, moderating and doing endless piles of paperwork - to flag up Jo Johnson's speech in which he outlined his plans for the future of higher education . I don't think this necessarily contained many surprises - except a personal one for me, in that I am struggling to find anything that I particularly disagree with.  Perhaps I am just not informed enough, but from what I can see these are the highlights:

I'm not sure whether it is because writing essays is clearly like making a cake, or whether it is simply that marking essays makes me hungry for cake - either way, I do seem to refer to cake an awful lot while marking. Here are some of the cake-related criticism I have made so far...

Yes indeed. Further pressure on FE Colleges to provide vocational degrees, reported in the Times Higher Ed . Now I have no problems with vocational degrees, and I have no problems with FE Colleges providing higher education. There is even a certain logic to the idea that FE Colleges are more likely to have the specific resources needed for teaching vocational and technical subjects, and less likely to have the kind of library and journal resources better suited to more academic studies. My problem with this is the way in which it generates a further class divide between the 'haves' and the 'have nots'. FE Colleges are usually located in more deprived areas, and are driven by more vicious financial constraints than any other sector. FE Colleges suffer huge government cut backs. FE teachers are paid less than school teachers and students at FE Colleges (particularly HE students) are often there because they have no opportunities of going anywhere else (although you onl...

Rather shockingly the other week, a former colleague asked expectedly where all my research was?  When faced with an incredulous expression, he explained that since I no longer appeared to be blogging, he simply assumed I was spending all my time researching. So, in order to avoid similar scurrilous accusations I have dug around the Apps folder and dusted off the 'ole 'Blogger' button. One of the schemes that has been keeping me busy has been my plan to develop a magazine that can publish student work, and provide a resource that helps under- and post-graduates remain engaged with their course and with their institution.  This has been something I have wanted to do for some time, but having some experience of journalism I was very tentative to start something that I knew I would not have the time to continue. This is a real issue, I expect, for most of us. It is great when we have ideas and schemes which we really think would benefit the students - but the reali...

Here is a joke: A man in a hot air balloon realised he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted, “Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.” The woman below replied, “You’re in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You’re between 51 and 52 degrees latitude and between 0 and 1 degree longitude.” “You must be an academic,” said the balloonist. “I am,” replied the woman, “How did you know?” “Well,” answered the balloonist ”everything you told me is technically correct, but I’ve no ideas what to do with your information, and the fact is I’m still lost. Frankly, you’ve not been much help at all.” The woman below responded, “You must be an administrator.” “I am,” replied the balloonist, “but how did you know?” “Well,” said the woman, “you don’t know where you are or where you’re going. You have risen to where you are due to a...

  I have been pondering of late my new venture into teaching Creative Writing - which I will be doing this semester. It comes at the same time that I have been expending considerable thought on how to embed employability more explicitly into the English modules which I teach, and one of the first things I have had to address is the issue of how useful a Creative Writing module will be for students? After all, the idea of Creative Writing on an English Literature and Language degree might at first seem a little incongruous. Even the images associated with 'Creative Writing' tend towards the archaic and the disconnected: Old type-writers, pencils and fountain pens scratching away on parchment-type paper.  Unlike linguistics or the theoretical and historical weight of Language and Literature, the idea of sitting around discussing our own jolly wee stories might seem a little irrelevant - like an short vacation from the critical rigours of academic study.  ...

 First blog of the year.  Although, let's be honest I have been somewhat lacking in blogging commitment over the last few months - something for which I am sure you have been extremely grateful. Of course the stimulus to start up again is - as is so often the case - marking.  When faced with a seemingly insurmountable pile of work, frankly any kind of displacement activity will do. There is another motivation though.  One of the reasons marking work can be such an arduous activity is that a great deal of effort tends to be exerted into finding the best way to provide summative feedback to students.  The feedback on essays has to serve three main functions: 1)   Justifying the grade to students: A grade should never be arbitrary. Often a marker might spend quite a lot of time determining what the most accurate grade is - distinguishing carefully down to the last %. The feedback is, in one sense, a record of that decision-making proc...

Here we are again with another assessment to post.  So far I have not had any bad feedback on the various draft things I have been planning to inflict on my students - which either means that they are not so bad after all, or that people are simply too polite to say anything. This one is for a final year module on Cultural Studies.  The aim of the module is to encourage students to apply the methods of textual and critical analysis used in the study of literature, to a broader range of 'texts' drawn from culture and society. This element of the assessment is an assessed discussion.  It has always seemed to me that a discussion is a more effective way of measuring a students' capacity to synthesise and evaluate ideas than a mere presentation.  It demands that students engage with a less fixed or planned set of ideas, and means that there is a focus placed on the interactive skills which students are encouraged to practice during normal seminar discussions. Here ...