“… In a statement this afternoon, the CAO confirmed that the website went down last night and it apologised to applicants for the inconvenience. The statement read: ‘CAO staff worked to resolve the issue on Saturday morning 27 June and the website was back in service at 1pm on Saturday 27 June. Volume of traffic was not a contributing factor to the interruption of service’ …” (more)
[RTÉ News, 27 June]
“The CAO website, which deals with college and university applications, crashed this morning. Many students had planned to make use of the Change of Mind facility this weekend before the deadline on 1 July …” (more)
[RTÉ News, 27 June]
“One of my favourite blogs is Erin O’Connor’s Critical Mass, a blog dedicated to commentary on the state of academe in general and American higher education in particular. She is invariably interesting and unfailingly provocative, if not always right; and her discussions of academic freedom in all its guises have helped to clarify what I think about such matters. Last week, she blogged about a new report from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA, where she is a Research Fellow) on Protecting the Free Exchange of Ideas. How Trustees Can Advance Intellectual Diversity on Campus …” (more)
[Eoin O’Dell, Cearta, 26 June]
“‘Article-Level Metrics at PLoS’ takes the view that readers need some way to measure, or at least indicate, the ‘worth’ (or ‘impact’ etc) of a journal article. With over a million articles published per year it’s impossible to read everything and so filtering tools are needed. Some journals have been experimenting with providing data on online usage, but PLoS is going further than this. We are at the start of a program to provide citations, usage data, social bookmarking activity …” (more)
[Gerry McKiernan, Scholarship 2.0, 26 June]
“An item this week in the Belfast Telegraph reported that, as the recession affects employment and job prospects, more people are opting for university degree programmes, and in particular postgraduate (and post-experience) degrees. In this particular case, students were reported to be causing a surge in demand for the programmes of the Business School of the University of Ulster; I expect that the experience is similar across business schools in the other universities in Ireland …” (more)
[Ferdinand von Prondzynski, University Blog, 26 June]
“… German universities are underfunded by international standards. Professors juggle scores of students; at top American universities they nurture a handful. In switching to the bachelors-masters degrees prescribed by Europe’s standardising ‘Bologna process’, many universities tried to cram bachelors degrees into just six terms. Only six German universities are among the top 100 in the Shanghai rankings (Munich is highest, at 55th). Just 21% of each age cohort gets a degree; the OECD average is 37%. A high-wage country with few natural resources cannot afford sub-par universities …” (more)
[Economist, 25 June]
“For 2000 years, the advancement of knowledge in western civilization has taken a path of increasing specialization. We have approached understanding our world by deconstructing it into smaller and smaller fragments creating the disciplines and subdisciplines in order to be able to predict, or at least to explain, behaviour in nature, individuals, and society. In today’s knowledge landscape there are powerful drivers for multidisciplinary research …” (more)
[Jill Trewhella, GlobalHighEd, 26 June]
“The colossal debts accumulated by medical students are deterring school-leavers and narrowing the social intake of the profession, doctors’ leaders have warned. The next generation of NHS doctors will emerge from six years of study owing as much as £46,000, the British Medical Association calculates. Further tuition fee increases will destroy ‘any pretence [of] widening access to medical education’ …” (more)
[Owen Bowcott, Guardian, 26 June]
“Student debt in Northern Ireland hit a fresh high as undergraduates take out government loans to help pay tuition fees, official figures showed today. The Student Loans Company lent £111.8 million (€130.5 million) last year for maintenance costs, an increase of almost 3per cent. More students are entering higher education and Employment and Learning Minister Sir Reg Empey is considering the future of student finance …” (more)
[Irish Times, 25 June]
“The UK National Union of Students has, amongst its key campaigns, one called ‘Mark my Words, not my Name’. This campaign is designed to persuade or cajole those higher education institutions not yet using anonymous marking for examinations and assessments to do so. The purpose of the campaign is to prevent bias, conscious or unconscious, on the part of examiners. For example, the NUS campaign asserts that there is evidence that students from ethnic minorities fare worse in examinations in those institutions where there is no anonymous marking, compared with those where there is. But even where such evidence cannot be found, the argument is that anonymous marking gives students greater confidence in the impartiality of the system …” (more)
[Ferdinand von Prondzynski, University Blog, 25 June]
“Over the past several months, French academics have been facing a grave situation. The Sarkozy Government has proposed a reform of the universities that would put more power into the hands of the president of their university, and weaken the role of peer review. This reform will significantly affect the degree of autonomy of faculty teaching in universities. It is feared that university presidents will depend on their local protégés (who are often selected on political, instead of academic criteria) to make a number of important decisions that will affect the lives of faculty. Universalistic mechanisms had been put in place at the national level to prevent local favoritism and particularism. This system is now threatened from within …” (more)
[Michèle Lamont, Crooked Timber, 25 June]
“Today’s Financial Times has a full page analysis (’An industry to grow‘) that examines aspects of state-society-economy relations with respect to stem cell research. The author, Clive Cookson (who also runs the FT.com Science Blog), deftly weaves five threads through the article: the role of the state in shaping a very geographically uneven development process; the role of key university-based researchers (like UW-Madison’s James Thomson) in spurring on innovation; the evolution of technology in shaping the research process and associated ethical debates; the evolving role of the private sector in fueling (or not) stem cell research and associated commercialization dynamics; and the factors shaping the actual and perceived temporal dimensions of stem cell research …” (more)
[GlobalHigherEd, 25 June]
“The reading lists of lecturers at the University of Nottingham’s School of Politics and International Relations are being scrutinised for material that is illegal or could incite violence. The institution has set up a ‘module review committee’, made up of teaching-group heads, to advise on academics’ teaching material. A document about the process explains that the reviews’ purpose is to provide feedback to staff on a range of issues, including the topics covered, the assessment methods used and ‘whether any material on reading lists could be illegal or might be deemed to incite people to use violence’ …” (more)
[Melanie Newman, Times Higher Education, 25 June]
“The notion of the ivory tower is under threat as academics embrace links with industry as a central tenet of their profession – and not just in the hard sciences. The largest survey of academic engagement with business has found that knowledge exchange is now a major part of university life, with the social sciences having as strong a link with business as physics …” (more)
[Hannah Fearn, Times Higher Education, 25 June]
“A few weeks ago the Irish Times ran an article on this blog, and since then a number of people have written to me or spoken with me about it, in particular with these two questions: (i) has it been a good idea? – and (ii) how long can I keep doing this? The answer to the first question is, on balance, yes …” (more)
[Ferdinand von Prondzynski, University Blog, 24 June]
“It is ‘a sham’, a system that is ‘too often abused’; it is ‘obsolete’ and serves only as ‘a fig leaf’: critics of the UK’s external examiner system have not minced their words. Last summer, when a series of allegations about declining standards in higher education hit the headlines, the spotlight turned on the singular role of the external examiner – a post that is ubiquitous in British universities but is found in few other countries …” (more)
[Rebecca Attwood, Times Higher Education, 25 June]
“‘Keep the underqualified out’ is the subtext of the very controversial proposal to restrict entry to university science courses to the top 20pc of Leaving Cert students. It smacks of elitism and the fact that it comes from the Royal Irish Academy – described on its website as “principal learned society in Ireland” – will confirm that view. But its discussion document raises very disturbing questions and challenges …” (more)
[John Walshe, Independent, 24 June]
“The usual crabbiness of British higher education has moved up a notch. First, we have reports of an increase in student complaints making it to the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education, then we have Frank Furedi complaining about all this complaining, followed by aggrieved correspondents writing to Times Higher Education to complain about Furedi complaining about all this complaining. The great thing about this escalation is that all the parties can avoid taking seriously all the boring questions about what higher education is supposed to be achieving, for whom, on what terms and with what resources …” (more)
[Alan Ryan, Times Higher Education, 25 June]
“The University of the West of England (UWE) will be hit by a demonstration on Wednesday 24 June as staff, students and external examiners protest outside an exam board meeting over cuts to language courses. The protestors, led by UCU, will be outside the Bolland Library on the Frenchay campus at 1pm. The university has announced that it has ceased recruitment to all specialist language degrees with immediate effect. The decision means that students who have already accepted unconditional offers for 2009 will no longer be able to follow their chosen course at UWE …” (more)
[UCU, 23 June]
“The spelling mantra ‘i before e except after c’ is no longer worth teaching, according to the government. Advice sent to teachers says there are too few words which follow the rule and recommends using more modern methods to teach spelling to schoolchildren. The document, entitled Support for Spelling, is being distributed to more than 13,000 primary schools …” (more)
[BBC News, 20 June]
