“Sir, – I am writing in response to Sean Keaveny’s letter in which the author calls for a ‘root and branch’ review of junior cycle education (November 22nd). There was one. It culminated in the publication in 2015 of the Framework for Junior Cycle, which is currently being phased into schools …” (more)
[Pádraig Kirk, Irish Times, 2 December]
“Roddy Doyle is the latest high profile person to suggest that the Leaving Cert (LC) is not fit for purpose. Although best known as a writer, Doyle is a former teacher in a disadvantaged school so his opinion should be treated with a bit more respect than that of, say, David McWilliams, who has dismissed the Leaving Cert as little more than a ‘pub quiz’. Nonetheless, I think his comments are useless, in the sense that they don’t contribute anything useful to the discussion …” (more)
[An Irish Blog about Education, 29 November]
“Universities serve many different purposes depending on who one asks. Some of these are obvious; they analyse societal problems and offer solutions to them, they train people to be better, more critical citizens. Some are more disputable such as whether they should explicitly prepare people for careers …” (more)
[Garrett Kennedy, University Observer, 26 November]
“The traffic in Dublin is rarely light but in November it’s appalling. In November, the days are short and it rains a lot. Collisions on the ring road around Dublin (the M50) are a regular occurrence. On my way up to Drogheda last week to give a talk in a Further Education college, there was a major accident and the 40km trip took me two hours …” (more)
[An Irish Blog about Education, 22 November]
“I’ve been thinking a lot about the traditional-progressive divide in the last few days. In particular, I’ve been seeking a nice, concise definition of ‘constructivism’. No luck so far; it seems to mean what you want it to mean. Anyway, during my journey around the web, I came across the following description of traditional education. Here are my comments on what a progressive educator (obviously) thinks of traditional education …” (more)
[An Irish Blog about Education, 20 November]
“Drivetime‘s John Cooke talks to students in UL about exam mills, and Deirdre Stritch, programme manager with QQI, talks to Mary about the new rules that have been introduced to clamp down on academic cheating …” (mp3)
[RTÉ – Drivetime, 18 November]
“Sir, – A regular feature of opinion pieces in Irish newspapers is the promotion of what might be termed ‘progressive education’. Progressive educators tend to view learning as ‘natural’ and presume that if students are not engaged by their studies, then it must be due to the methods being used to teach them …” (more)
[Greg Foley, Irish Times, 18 November]
“A legal crackdown on the growing number of services writing essays or other assignments for third-level students is under way. New anti-cheating laws came into effect last week making it an offence either to provide or advertise cheating services or to publish adverts promoting such services …” (more)
[Katherine Donnelly, Independent, 15 November]
“Academic cheating using online ‘essay mills’ is posing a significant threat to the integrity of higher education, the State body responsible for policing standards in third level has warned. International research indicates there has been a sharp rise in written-to-order essays and dissertations, with as many as one in seven graduates admitting to paying someone to undertake an assignment for them …” (more)
[Carl O’Brien, Irish Times, 14 November]
“Once-robust fields are being broken up and stripped for parts. The humanities, we’re often told, are dying. And yet, even as traditional majors like English and history are indeed shrinking, the past decade has also seen the rise of a new kind of humanities, including a wave of hybrid fields such as the digital humanities, environmental humanities, energy humanities, global humanities, urban humanities, food humanities, medical humanities, legal humanities, and public humanities …” (more)
[Jeffrey J Williams, Chronicle of Higher Education, 14 November]
“Sir, – As Sean Byrne points out in his letter (November 7th), matrices, calculus and complex numbers were on the Leaving Cert, rather than the Inter Cert in the mid-1990s. However, that isn’t how my friend remembered it, and this makes the point that our memories of our own exam experiences can be fallible …” (more)
[David Malone, Irish Times, 11 November]
“Some secondary schools say they will be forced to reduce pupils’ access to foreign languages due to difficulties recruiting qualified teachers, according to a Department of Education audit. The report also shows evidence of a class gap in access to language tuition, with students in fee-paying secondary schools much more likely to have a choice of languages to study …” (more)
[Carl O’Brien, Irish Times, 11 November]
“Depending on who you ask, you may well receive a different answer on what it means to give or receive consent. ‘It’s simple’, someone might say, ‘No means No and Yes means Yes’. But in an environment where 32% of Irish students reported they would find it difficult to tell their partner they did not want to have sex and 1 in 4 female students have experienced unwanted sexual contact …” (more)
[Jack Ryan, Trinity News, 8 November]
“The Irish Universities Association (IUA) today officially launched the Enhancing Digital Capacity in Teaching and Learning in Irish Universities (EDTL) project as the final event of the World Conference on Online Learning. This is an ambitious three-year project, funded by the Higher Education Authority’s Innovation and Transformation Programme …” (more)
[IUA, 7 November]
“Sir, – Seán Byrne (Letters, November 7th) bemoans ‘the absence of matrices, calculus and complex numbers’ from a ‘modern maths exam’. Continuing, he states, ‘The topics listed were never on the Intermediate Certificate but they were essential topics on the Leaving Certificate until the 1990s’ …” (more)
[Fintan Gibney, Irish Times, 8 November]
“The biggest issue for me and many others about on-line education is assessment. The security and integrity of the assessment is paramount – this is easy to implement in an exam hall with Invigilators watching your every move, but not so on-line. Proctoring a test is not so easy – software is the only way to go? For end of semester/year exams, some institutions will insist on students attending the College to sit the exam in the traditional exam hall …” (more)
[Careful With That Axe, Eugene, 7 November]
“A consultation process on senior cycle education has found a strong appetite for change among students, parents and teachers who contributed, according to the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) …” (more)
[Emma O Kelly, RTÉ News, 7 November]
“Sir, – In an article on the issue of whether the Leaving Certificate was harder in the past than it is today (Education, November 5th), Dr David Malone of Maynooth University is quoted as stating that his research on this topic was prompted by a Tweet from a friend of his decrying the absence of matrices, calculus and complex numbers from a ‘modern Maths exam’ …” (more)
[Letters, Irish Times, 7 November]
“What sort of so-called modern maths exam lacks matrices, calculus and complex numbers? Dr David Malone, a mathematician at Maynooth University, noticed the question posed by a friend on Twitter and he wondered: has our maths education been dumbed down? Malone dug out a copy of an old Intermediate Cert (the precursor to the Junior Cert) maths paper from the mid-90s, when his friend sat the exam …” (more)
[Peter McGuire, Irish Times, 5 November]]
“Lectures are an hour long (some astoundingly 2/3 hours) because the Sumerians had a base-60 number system. It is for the convenience of timetabling, not the psychology of attention and retention …” (more)
[Donald Clark Plan B, 3 November]
