The importance of being useless. The tide of instrumentalism threatens to engulf the UK’s higher education sector, but could a new wave of liberal arts programmes signal a return to the ancient ideal of learning for its own sake? Nigel Tubbs hopes so Aristotle noted that the same ideas return in men’s minds, not once or twice but again and again.
By the same token, does the recent introduction of named liberal arts degrees at the universities of Winchester, Exeter, Birmingham, Kent and King’s College London (and in the nascent independent Catholic Benedictus College) signal the return, again, of the ancient ideal of education as an end in itself? Put differently, and not pejoratively, does it mean the return of “useless” education? In antiquity, a useless education was the highest and most noble form of education because it represented the genuinely free education of the genuinely free man. Perhaps the story of King Canute describes well any attempts to champion liberal arts degrees in the current educational climate.
The accidental technologist » Blog Archive » Mapping the Learning Space. Posted by Wayne Barry | Filed under Innovation, Learning, Learning Spaces, Mobile Learning, Project, Research, Technology So here we are at last, the sixth and final module that is “research methods”. I know that I would like to do my dissertation on learning spaces as my institution has just opened it’s doors to a new Library and Student Services centre called Augustine House. If you want a feel for the place, there’s an interactive floorplan that you can view and there is also a special Flickr set (compare these against the previous library provision). Incidently, anyone wanting to look at different examples of learning spaces that are situated across the UK can view JISC Infonet’s Flickr pages. JISC (2006) informs us that learning spaces: …should be able to motivate learners and promote learning as an activity, support collaborative as well as formal practice, provide a personalised and inclusive environment, and be flexible in the face of changing needs.
References JELS. (2009). On Educational Data Mining. The Department of Education released a draft report about big data and education today. It's called "Enhancing Teaching and Learning through Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics," a title that's unlikely to win any converts to the notion of a data-curious* view of learning. Part of what's going to get stuck in the craw is that phrase "data mining," I reckon. Despite all the potential and all the buzz about (big) data, data-mining remains something with a fairly negative connotation.
Advertisers. Political campaigns. Big government. As NYU doctoral student Solon Barocas argues in an interview at O'Reilly's Strata conference last year, that notion of data mining may be inaccurate, but the phrase "almost intuitively for most consumers implies scavenging through the data, trying to find secrets that you don't necessarily want people to know. " So what exactly would we construe as "questionable data mining practices" in education?
Photo credits: Helen Cook. 3 Reasons The Future of Learning Will Be Online. In recent years, more education professionals have noticed the benefits of online learning. Such programs allow students to comprehend a subject matter in a structure that can be more convenient for their learning styles. Time constraints for online learning programs are different than in the traditional classroom setting.
Students who do not cope well with the pressure of having to work quickly can take their time when necessary. Conversely, students who pick up on things faster and become bored with traditional programs can use online learning programs to work through the material at a quicker pace and move on to the next lesson. Each online program is different, so look at the pacing of the program to determine if the school offers this kind of flexibility.
Technology in Online Learning Online learning programs are also beneficial because they allow students to interact with technology more frequently. Increasing Acceptance of Online Learning Online Learning in College. EssayTyper. How to defend universities. Paul Seabright Stefan ColliniWHAT ARE UNIVERSITIES FOR? A contemporary manifesto in defence of our universities210pp. Allen Lane. Paperback, £9.99.978 1 8461 4482 0 Published: 7 March 2012 Tom Tower, Christ Church, Oxford F rom October to December of last year, Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, teachers of a Stanford University class called “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence”, put their course online as an experiment, making enrolment available free to anyone in the world who might be interested. It is not hard to see that information technology and the internet are already challenging universities to consider whether there is anything essential about physical presence in an educational institution.
Developments such as these may be the greatest threat the traditional university has ever faced, but they are not discussed in Stefan Collini’s new book, which does not mention computers or the internet. Paul Seabright teaches economics at the Toulouse School of Economics in France.
The world as you've never seen it before. 10 Awesome Tools To Make Infographics. Advertisement Who can resist a colourful, thoughtful venn diagram anyway? In terms of blogging success, infographics are far more likely to be shared than your average blog post. This means more eyeballs on your important information, more people rallying for your cause, more backlinks and more visits to your blog.
In short, a quality infographic done well could be what your blog needs right now. Designing An Infographic Some great tips for designing infographics: Keep it simple! Ideas for infographic formats include: Timelines;Flow charts;Annotated maps;Graphs;Venn diagrams;Size comparisons;Showing familiar objects or similar size or value. Here are some great tutorials on infographic creation: Creating Your Infographic Plan and research.If required, use free software to create simple graphs and visualisations of data.Use vector graphic software to bring these visualisations into the one graphic. Free Online Tools For Creating Infographics Stat Planet Hohli Creately New York Times Many Eyes Wordle. Universities set to lose £5.6bn as overseas applications plummet - Education - News. Restrictions on visas, the massive rise in tuition fees for European Union students at English universities and the murder of a student from India over Christmas are posing a threat to the future of universities, academics warned yesterday.
At stake is not only the vast extra earnings they bring to the economy – estimated at £5bn a year – but UK universities' reputation as being world-class institutions in which to study. One estimate, in a report by the consultants London Economics, reckoned that Britain could lose out on nearly £8bn in income – £2.3bn lost to the economy and £5.66bn in lost fees revenue.
Ministers have been anxious to crack down on immigration and have issued fewer waivers for students. "The trouble is that the Home Office is more important than the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills [which is more welcoming to international recruits] in Government," said Sir Peter Scott, professor of higher education at London University's Institute of Education. In numbers. iPads in the Classroom. 100 Time-Saving Search Engines for Serious Scholars. While burying yourself in the stacks at the library is one way to get some serious research done, with today’s technology you can do quite a bit of useful searching before you ever set foot inside a library. Undergraduates and grad students alike will appreciate the usefulness of these search engines that allow them to find books, journal articles and even primary source material for whatever kind of research they’re working on and that return only serious, academic results so time isn’t wasted on unprofessional resources.
Note: Visit our updated list for the latest in academic search engines. General Start off your research with one of these more general academic search engines. Intute: Use this website’s search tools to find the best and most reliable sites to start your research. Meta Search Want to search it all at once? Dogpile: Search Google, Yahoo, Bing and more at once with this great search engine. Databases and Archives Books and Journals Science Math and Technology Social Science.
Sources of illumination. Characterised by creativity and attuned to the needs of their age, the first European universities have important lessons for higher education today, says Miri Rubin As a historian of the Middle Ages, I am frequently asked about the links between universities then and now. Given the momentous changes that are affecting modern-day institutions of higher education and that touch the lives of so many people - students, parents, teachers, employers - such questions have become more frequent and more urgent, too.
All historians (especially those of us who focus on more ancient times) delight in pointing out parallels between "our" period and the present. An assessment of the role of medieval universities reveals some telling affinities between higher education then and now - and may hold lessons for today's turbulent times. The standards of written Latin still depended on the conventions that had developed in the Greco-Roman world, encoded in the liberal arts of rhetoric, logic and grammar. The Film Archive Forum. In Autumn 2011 the 'Film Archive Forum' is being relaunched as Film Archives UK. Film Archives UK (Film Archive Forum) represents the UK's public sector film and television archives in all archival aspects of the moving image, and acts as the advisory body on national moving image archive policy.
Login. Call for Papers. Full name / name of organization: Southern Connecticut State University contact email: textincontext.southernct@gmail.com Text in Context is a graduate student journal published electronically by graduate students in the English Department at Southern Connecticut State University. We seek submissions exploring the text itself and its function(s) and implications both internally and externally—literary analysis, poetry studies, critical theory, popular reception of a particular work, close readings, historical relevance, etc. Though the journal primarily deals with English studies, we welcome original papers from other disciplines, provided those papers focus on the text and/or its context—pedagogy and instructional design, localization of language in the brain, regional dialects and their origins, etc. Pop Culture in Context Volume 2, Issue 1 (Fall 2014/Winter 2015) will also feature a section of papers devoted to popular culture and its contexts. Book Reviews Submission Guidelines.
The essay film – ‘a form that thinks’ Toby Lichtig Timothy Corrigan THE ESSAY FILM From Montaigne, after Marker 237pp. Oxford University Press. £60 (paperback, £17.99).978 0 19 978169 0 Errol Morris TABLOID Various cinemas Werner Herzog INTO THE ABYSS London Film Festival Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood MAGIC TRIP London Film Festival Morgan Spurlock POM WONDERFUL PRESENTS: THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER SOLD Various cinemas Published: 30 November 2011 “ Essay films are arguably the most innovative and popular forms of filmmaking since the 1990s”, Timothy Corrigan claims in his diligent new study, The Essay Film.
For Corrigan, the essayistic film “describes the many-layered activities of a personal point of view as a public experience”. The best of these by a long distance is Errol Morris’s Tabloid, an exuberant and entertaining tale of sex, religion and sensationalist storytelling. Much of the success of Tabloid comes from its studies in character. Equally frustrating, though for very different reasons, is the new film by Alex Gibney.