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The Two Cultures. Melvyn Bragg’s new Radio 4 series, The Value of Culture (9am and 9:30pm every day this week), interrogates beliefs about the meaning of "culture" since the 19th century. Each episode is framed around a high-profile fissure on the subject, having begun on Monday with Matthew Arnold and his argument that “Men of culture are the true apostles of equality”, which was met with fervent criticism from “Darwin’s Bulldog”, Thomas Huxley. This morning Bragg discussed the life and work of C P Snow, whose famous thesis on the division of the two cultures we broadly delineate as the arts and sciences, was first published in essay form by the New Statesman in 1956.

He continued, “Not to have read War and Peace and La Cousine Bette and La Chartreuse de Parme is not to be educated, but so is not to have a glimmer of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.” This would be the scientific equivalent of “Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?” I think we’ve liberated an awful lot of talent. Philip Maughan C P Snow. 12 Fabulous Academic Search Engines. Coming to you from the wonderful Nova Scotian city, Halifax (Canada), Educational Technology and Mobile Learning is an educational blog dedicated to curating, reviewing and sharing EdTech tools and mobile apps.

The purpose is to help teachers and educators effectively integrate digital technologies into their day-to-day teaching, learning and professional development. For any questions regarding the blog website or the published content , please contact EdTech admin, editor and blog owner, Med Kharbach at: info@educatorstechnology.com. Med Kharbach is a doctoral researcher and a former teacher with 10 years of classroom teaching experience. Med's research interests include: discourse analysis, language learning, linguistics, Internet linguistics, critical linguistics, new (emerging) literacies, critical pedagogy, and educational technology. Kharbach, M. Example: Kharbach, M. (2016, December 30). 9 Fundamental digital skills for 21st century teachers [Blog post]. Remixing Plagiarism: a #digped Discussion. How Twitter will revolutionise academic research and teaching | Higher Education Network | Guardian Professional.

ERN-LWE - European Research Network on Learning to Write Effectively. Scrivener. Organizing research. Shame in Academic Writing - Advice. By Rachel Toor My advisee came in to the cafe, sat down awkwardly, and looked at me out of the corners of his eyes. He describes himself as having "curious posture" and "British teeth," though he's from the Midwest. He writes well, with energy and imagination and a fine attention to his sentences.

It has been a pleasure being his thesis adviser, and I always look forward to our meetings. For months I had been reading his work and telling him it wasn't quite there. For months he listened to me—asking smart questions, grilling me on general issues about the craft of writing, wondering how other authors got away with moves he was trying to make, and working hard to figure out what was going wrong in his own work. The essays he'd given me were revisions of drafts I'd seen before. But at the time of our meeting, his essays were close to being finished, and I wanted to make sure that every line was exactly right. After I made those edits, I e-mailed my version to my student.

PhD Stress. 30 tips for successful academic research and writing. Choosing something that you are passionately interested in to research is a great first step on the road to successful academic writing but it can be difficult to keep the momentum going. Deborah Lupton explains how old-fashioned whiteboards and online networking go hand-in-hand, and offers advice for when it is time to just ‘make a start’ or go for a bike ride. As part of preparing for a workshop on academic publishing for early career academics, I jotted down some ideas and tips to share with the group which I thought I would post here. In the process of writing 12 books and over 110 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters over a career which has mostly been part-time because of juggling the demands of motherhood with academic work, I have developed some approaches that seem to work well for me.

These tips are in no particular order, apart from number 1, which I consider to be the most important of all. Planning your research schedule Making a start Connect for inspiration. Why academic publishing is like a coffee shop: An enormous mystique adds relatively little. Prefer a short, sharp burst of espresso to a heavy, flavoured mocha-chip frappucino?

Phillip Lord explains why he wants academic publishing to give up the extra fuss and to become more like his strong, jolting shot of morning espresso. Drinking coffee in Italy is a quite different experience from drinking coffee in many UK coffee shops. In Italy, first you go into a bar — the Italian ‘bar’ is not the same thing as British pub. Assuming you want a coffee rather than food, you ask for a coffee in Italian. The barman will turn around, fiddle with the coffee machine for a moment or two, give you a coffee and then take 1 euro. In the UK, you enter the coffee shop; the shops are often quite large, and involve sofas. The reason for all of this fuss is called market segmentation: in the UK, coffee is a luxury experience. My experience with academic authoring and publishing is rather like this.

So, which parts of the publishing process do not actually make the coffee taste any better? In a knowledge economy, plagiarism is just a matter of degree. 'I have been subjected to verbal abuse, threats, spitting and blackmail.' I WAS down to the last five essays, each one taking more time to assess than the paid-for rate. I took up the next essay. Immediately it struck me as being much more sophisticated than any of the previous offerings, which had, for the most part regurgitated more or less accurately the information presented in lectures or readings. I found myself ticking enthusiastically - at last here was a student who had taken the opportunity to think deeply about issues and develop a persuasive line of argument. I tried to recall the student but could only vaguely remember hesitant contributions to discussions. And then I remembered the first class (standard for all my classes) when we carefully worked our way through the handout and exercise on Strategies to Avoid Plagiarism.

Advertisement An hour later, I had identified 60 per cent of the essay as a ''cut-and-paste'' job. Identifying plagiarism is distasteful and even dangerous. Students prefer good lectures over the latest technology in class. Survey of 15,000 Quebec university students shows they’re “old school” when it comes to teaching technology. by Léo Charbonneau University students prefer the “old school” approach of an engaging lecture over the use of the latest technological bells and whistles in the classroom.

That was a finding in a recent study of the perceptions of students and professors in Quebec on the use of information and communications technologies, or ICTs, in higher learning. “Students are old school – they want lectures. The study was conducted by Dr. The results indicate that students and professors don’t always agree on what works best in the classroom, says Dr. Nearly all instructors reported using ICTs in the classroom at least occasionally (only 46 of the 2,640 instructors reported never using ICTs). Another interesting tidbit from the survey: students seem underwhelmed by the prospect of online learning.

Dr. Academic and Scholar Search Engines and Sources - An Annotated Link Compilation. This new guide focuses on the latest and most significant academic and scholar search engines and sources. With the constant addition of new and pertinent information released online from every sector, it is very easy to experience information overload. A real asset in responding to the challenges of so much data is to apply techniques to identify and locate significant, reliable academic and scholarly information that resides in both the visible and invisible web. The following selected academic and scholar search engines and sources offer a wide range of actionable information retrieval and extraction sources to help you accomplish your research goals. Academic Archive Online - DiVA In DiVA you can find theses, dissertations and other publications in full-text from a number of Nordic universities.

Academic Earth - Thousands of Video Lectures From the World's Top Scholars Academic Info. Expanding Our Definitions of Scholarly Forms. Last week at Imagining America 2012, I was part of a conversation on Expanding Forms of Scholarly Inquiry along with Nick Sousanis, currently working on his comic dissertation, and Paul Tritter and Tom Neville of Hack the Dissertation. We wanted to talk about the practical side of doing scholarly work that breaks out of the page–like the “post-monograph” works Adeline Koh discussed with Anvil Academic. What does this slowly growing interest mean for our own potential scholarship and teaching? Possibly, relevance to a wider audience–and a fate for dissertation work besides gathering dust on a library shelf. The back and forth over conference tweeting these past weeks suggests a greater anxiety over control in scholarly discourse. Pre-Internet, most modes for distributing ideas were far less immediate, and even incidents or thoughts shared within the physical space of a conference could only travel within that network at the speed of gossip.

But are we ready for expanded scholarly forms? Why Journals are the Dinosaurs of Academia. Answer: They wield enormous (and terrifying) power, yet they are ill-adapted to function in a changing environment. In most corners of society, it’s a become a trope to say that the Internet has changed everything; but online communication is still far from integrated into the norms and practices of the academy, whose pace of change and adaptation is nothing less than glacial. Anyone familiar with academic careers knows that conventional (read print) journal publications are the be-all end-all criterion in evaluating potential hires—the meaning behind the well-worn cliché: “publish or perish.” The practice of using journal articles as the sole criterion in evaluating an academic’s productivity is an artifact of an epoch long-passed. In the age of the printing press, journals were, by far, the most efficient and enduring form of communication. It would be superficial, however, to simply criticize print article (and to promote digital articles).

On Academic Live-Tweeting & Other Threats. [4 October 08:30am BST Update: last night the Guardian published what I have called an "edited remix" --all remixes are editions etc.-- of the text in this post. It's titled "Live-tweeting at academic conferences: 10 rules of thumb" and it can be read here.] [3 October 11:04am BST Update: I have published a follow-up to this post listing some resources I consider useful for academic live-tweeting.] Intro By now, a big chunk of the Higher Education demographic I follow and interact with on Twitter (directly or indirectly) is likely to be well aware of what was called "Twittergate". It started as a discussion (on Twitter, where else?)

As noted by Adeline on her Storify, the debate inspired an insightful post by Tressie McMillan Cottom. The debate first came into my radar at least 20 hours after Adeline posted her Storify. Bridge Personally I had been deferring writing a blog post sharing what I consider to be good practices in academic live-tweeting. Chorus Outro 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Why academics need to think of themselves as writers | Higher Education Network | Guardian Professional. Thursday 20 October was the National Day on Writing created by the National Council of Teachers of English. In order to celebrate this day, programmes such as the National Writing Project asked readers to share why they write. On Twitter, this took shape in the #whyiwrite hashtag, with plenty of people posting in 140 characters or less reasons why they write. I participated in the celebration by tweeting, and encouraged others to post as well.

However, among the tweets I read, I didn't see any that said "I write because I am a writer". We often think of ourselves as people who write (as in, who perform the act of writing). Back when I taught first-year writing, I used to start the semester with the question "what is a writer? " I don't blame them. At my new job I talk to students, faculty and staff about writing on a regular basis. Why does thinking of yourself as a writer matter?

Do you think of yourself as a writer? Are lessons for lecturers the way ahead? | Higher Education Network. Now that students are paying up to £9,000 a year for university tuition, they are looking closely at the sort of teaching they get for their money – as are the institutions that provide that teaching. Yet, until recently, no comprehensive survey existed on how teaching quality was being influenced by the increasing number of teaching development programmes for academics.

Over the past few months, policy research organisation Host, commissioned by the Higher Education Academy (HEA), has tried to rectify this, publishing a report in September that made recommendations designed to help "future-proof" the higher education sector and inform HEA policy. It called for continued research on a local, national and international level to improve both the amount of evidence available on the effectiveness of teaching programmes in higher education and the ability to collect it.

Varied quality There were, however, warnings at the roundtable about relying too heavily on NSS feedback. Paths to promotion. Is "What is the Future of the University?" the wrong question? Over-concern for one's own future is often an invitation to those who present themselves as the 'strong man/women' ready to save the country/institution/etc. As Hayek and others warned us a long time ago, these people are dangerous. Thinking of others needs to come before self-interest.

Universities are currently rather over-concerned about their future, preferring to worry about that than the terrible burden that is to be carried by their students. There's been an interesting video posted by the University Alliance ( which outlines four possible ways in which Universities might develop: The basic comparison is between Uni-public, Uni-market, Uni-divide and Uni-wifi. All four scenarios are predicated on the separation between economy (as we understand it) and education (as we understand it).

In terms of the categories of collaboration versus individualism, there are similar ontological problems. Seven reasons why journals reject papers. I’ve written about rejections several times, and most of this is scattered throughout the blog, so I thought it might be helpful to amalgamate the most important points together. All in one place. There are some very common reasons why journal papers get rejected: (1) They are overcrowded with ideas . They lack focus. Most journal papers have one point to make, they work with one idea, one angle. (2) They don’t reassure the reader that the research is trustworthy, in other words, that it has been thorough and that it fits within a recognizable tradition of work. Different disciplines require different levels of detail about how the research was conducted, with whom or what, where, how often, how many … The vast majority of journals require something that is methodological and/or about methods. (3) They don’t fit the journal.

. (4) There’s no sense that the paper is adding anything new. . (5) The writing sounds inexperienced. . (6) The paper is poorly structured . Like this: Like Loading... Recognise academic writing as a craft… and when you’re 80 per cent happy, kick it out the door! A shameless plug.