There are some – related – articles in today’s Irish Independent on themes which have featured on this blog. A report published yesterday by the Higher Education Authority (HEA) shows that the number of students going to college has hit a record high (the Irish Times ran the same story under the headline that there are more students than farmers in Ireland) and that courses in science and computing are now back in favour.

However, technology is not necessarily an uncritically good thing, as is shown by the headline to another story: I’m so addicted to email, Facebook and Twitter, I have to hide it from my wife …. In that piece, reviewing The tyranny of email by John Freeman, James Delingpole owns up to his own addiction to communications technology. Of course, he is not the only person whose life is being ruined by email. Moreover, a similar addiction drives the use of mobile phones and laptops in class as increasingly popular displacement activities.

Finally, and a little more seriously, the print edition – but not, so far as I can see, the online edition (though it may in time be published in the archives of the Education section or, perhaps, of the Technology sections) – has a really interesting piece on distance learning at third level, discussing the Open University and Hibernia College. Online education poses both challenges and opportunities for bricks and mortar universities, and they will have to be faced and embraced if universities are to survive and thrive.

The moral of the stories is, of course, that if the undergraduates who now outnumber farmers can’t tear themselves away from their email and social networking sites, they might decide to eschew traditional universities and study online instead!

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Patents encourage innovation – an inventor who is awarded a patent over an invention can exploit it and profit from it, at least according to the Irish Patents Office. Innovation therefore matters, and Innovation Dublin 2009, a week long festival of public events aimed at promoting and stimulating innovation and creativity in the city, begins today. The festival, co-ordinated by Dublin City Council, is a key project of the Creative Dublin Alliance (press release | Ferdinand | Karlin), a collaborative group made up of Dublin local authorities, universities, state agencies, businesses and the not-for-profit sector, which was launched in Trinity’s Science Gallery earlier this year. According to a TCD Communications Office press release:

As part of Innovation Dublin 2009 Trinity College has planned a range of seminars, showcases, discussions, workshops and exhibitions promoting both Dublin and Trinity College as an energetic, diverse and innovative place to learn, live, work and create. Events within Trinity will range from interactive technology showcases to the analysis of medieval manuscripts; from virtual exhibitions documenting living histories of older Dubliners to a forum on the generation of ideas.

Doubtless, some of this innovation will lead to patents, especially in the universities. In my earlier post on Universities and Patents, I referred to the decision of French J in Federal Court of Australia in University of Western Australia v Gray (No 20) [2008] FCA 498 (17 April 2008) in which UWA failed to assert a patent over anti-cancer technologies developed by the defendant, who had been a member of its academic staff. UWA appealed, and in University of Western Australia v Gray [2009] FCAFC 116 (3 September 2009), the Full Court of the Federal Court upheld the decision of French J (unsurprisingly, the UWA has sought leave to appeal to the High Court of Australia).

It is an important judgment, covering a wide range of issues relating to innovation, universities and patents. Read the rest of this entry »

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The recently renegotiated Programme For Government (doc | pdf | scribd) between the Green Party and Fianna Fáil contains the following clause:

Conscious of the economic pressures on parents today, this Government will not proceed with any new scheme of student contribution for Third Level education.

So, that’s it then, the reintroduction of third-level fees is off the agenda for the lifetime of the current government.

Update: Ferdinand von Prondzynski writes that the decision

… will come back to haunt us. It is a bad decision, made for the wrong reasons. … As the taxpayer is in no position to increase funding, or even maintain the existing totally inadequate levels, we are now facing a situation where the increasingly scarce resources will be concentrated on the wealthier sections of the population and the disadvantaged will be neglected. In addition, the sector as a whole will be asset stripped and will be unable to compete. … I have been at the coalface now for a decade of trying to maintain a world class system of education with the resources that increasingly reflect the aspirations of a developing country. This decision may save votes, but will do long term damage to the sector. It is a bad day for higher education.

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I suppose if I spent ages thinking about it, I could find a spurious thread linking three stories that caught my eye over the last few days, but in truth there is none, except that they update matters which I have already discussed on this blog. (Oh, all right then, they’re all about different aspects of freedom of expression: the first shows that copyright should not prevent academic discussion; the second shows that hecklers should not have a veto; and the third is about broadcasting regulation).

First, I had noted the proclivity of the estate of James Joyce to be vigorous in defence of its copyrights; but it lost a recent case and now has agreed to pay quite substantial costs as a consequence:

Joyce estate settles copyright dispute with US academic

The James Joyce Estate has agreed to pay $240,000 (€164,000) in legal costs incurred by an American academic following a long-running copyright dispute between the two sides. The settlement brings to an end a legal saga that pre-dates the publication in 2003 of a controversial biography of Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, written by Stanford University academic Carol Shloss. …

More: ABA Journal | Chronicle | Law.com | San Francisco Chronicle | Slashdot | Stanford CIS (who represented Shloss) esp here | Stanford University News (a long and informative article).

Second, I have long been of the view that hecklers should not be allowed to veto unpopular views, and none come more unpopular that holocaust-denier David Irving. Now comes news that NUI Galway’s Lit & Deb society have withdrawn their controversial invitation to Irving for security reasons:

David Irving address in NUIG cancelled due to ‘security concerns’

The proposed visit of the controversial historian David Irving to the NUI, Galway Literary & Debating Society has been cancelled. In a statement the Lit & Deb said the cancellation was “due to security concerns and restrictions imposed by the university authorities”. …

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A little while ago I blogged about the potential challenge which online education can pose for the traditional model of the university, comparing and contrasting the positions of newspapers and universities as they face online challenges. Now I see that Grant McCracken is also musing that what’s happening to journalism may some day happen to higher education (disintermediating higher education) – the Washington Post also notes that online classes are just cheaper to produce – but then McCracken points out that whilst there may be a move towards self-instruction, the key difference between newspapers and universities is accreditation:

We will continue to need a university, or someone, to certify students have completed their degree requirements, and perhaps how they did. Then the question becomes:

what’s the best way to do accreditation?

The English universities are a useful indicator. Traditionally, they forgave the separation [of] knowledge acquisition from examination. The universities allowed the student an extraordinary latitude. If a student could pass her exams, it didn’t matter if she had spent all her time in the college bar. She was good to go.

We could use a model of this kind. We would leave it to students to prepare their own programs of education, to gather on line with whomever they found interesting and useful. … Students in self instruction will have to decide whether they are ready to sit their exams. They will visit the accreditation website occasionally and examine the oral exams and written ones. They ask themselves, “Could I handle questions of that order?” And if they think they can, they book an appointment, pay their fee, and wait for the examiners to swing back through town. …

For a glimpse of a future that is rapidly become present, have a look at the Online Degrees Hub. For a major Irish player in this market, have a look at Hibernia College.

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As a counterpoint to the THE’s piece on The seven deadly sins of the academy, about which I wrote here, Mary Beard has exasperatedly pointed out that the entry about lust was – as the author himself has also had to explain – satirical:

Sex with students? Is Terence Kealey as misunderstood as Juvenal?

… I hadn’t realised that there was a storm about Terence Kealey’s piece on Lust … So I took a look at it. … It was instantly clear to me that this was SATIRE. … Taking several more, careful looks at the Kealey piece, I was left in no doubt that he was aiming his darts at the ways crude sexual exploitation of female students gets justified, by satircally mimicking the locker room style in which it is discussed. Come on everyone, NO VICE-CHANCELLOR (not even of Buckingham) calls women students a “perk” unless satirically (and aiming a dart at precisely those assumptions). Honest.

It was however a dreadful experience looking not only at the press reports of all this but also the comments of the THE website (some of which were presumably written by academics, who showed no ability to read or understand satire AT ALL . . . maybe they were all computer scientist, but I rather doubt it). To be fair, a few did make the plea for humour and satire. But not many. …

The trouble with satire, as poor Kealey has found, is that the literal minded are always liable not to get it. And the satirist is inadvertently taken to support the very views s/he is attacking.

Perhaps, for the literal-minded, we should replace “lust” in the list with “academic insularity”, and then confine the literal-minded to their insulæ.

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As our new first year students arrive this week, there is a strong orientation programme for them, to ease them into Trinity life. Trinity News, one of the student newspapers, writes in praise of Trinity’s old-fashioned freshers’ week; another college’s publication last week looked at Freshers’ First Steps; and GoToCollege has some useful tips for those Starting College. Flying Saucer; a current UK student has some excellent advice (entertainingly quirky, often practical, but occasionally misleading: have loud parties, make friends, don’t buy books); a recent US graduate does something similar in a very American fashion (prioritize, study, find meaning); the Guardian warns that the first week is more likely to challenge your wallet than your brain; Registrarism emphasises that newspaper copy doesn’t always recognise that there is much more to freshers’ week than commerce and alcohol; but by far the most useful pieces of college advice is a series of columns in the New York Times called College Advice, From People Who Have Been There Awhile. Some favourites:

• Gerald Graff: Recognize that knowing a lot of stuff won’t do you much good unless you can do something with it by turning it into an argument.
• Garry Wills: read, read, read; similarly Harold Bloom: read authors who are difficult and demand rereading, but that doubles their value.
• Carol Berkin: don’t alienate your lecturers; and laugh at all (or at least most) of their jokes.

Finally, Mike Madison has tips for newbies; his most important advice is the title to this post (some links added):

In the words of the great Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Don’t Panic. …

And if the panic takes hold (or not) try the song below, “Panic Switch” (lyrics here) by Silversun Pickups (I recommend going to 11). …

Panic Switch – Silversun Pickups

Other classic examples of the ‘don’t panic’ advice: Coldplay (YouTube) and Dad’s Army (YouTube). Don’t panic, and enjoy.

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The current edition of Times Higher Education (I can’t get used to this odd title, I keep wanting to add “Supplement“; but it was dropped some time ago, so I must resist the temptation) has articles on the temptations that academics and students find hard to resist.

First, the academics:

The seven deadly sins of the academy

… The inward-looking, incestuous atmosphere of university life has long made it a breeding ground for some of the canonical deadly sins. … It would not be hard to draw up a list of traditional academic deadly sins on the basis of such examples. But how many have survived in today’s academy …? Which have disappeared? And, assuming goodwill hasn’t broken out on all sides, what have they been replaced by?

Modernisation and a huge expansion of the sector have brought fresh air into even the stuffiest quadrangles. So, if people in general are subject to avarice, envy, gluttony, pride, lust, sloth and wrath, what are the vices particularly prominent on campuses and in common rooms now? …

The answer, it seems, is:

• Sartorial Inelegance (this matter is always in the eye of the beholder, especially if my tie is too loud);
• Procrastination (this post is evidence that I occasionally succumb, though elsewhere in the THE there is an article advising academics to blog, so really, I’m working, honestly, I am …);
• Snobbery (this will, no doubt, be presumed against me, based on where I work, so I’ll just move swiftly on, waving at the riff-raff [add insulting link to taste here] as I go);
• Lust (no comment; does the Fifth Amendment apply in cyber-space?);
• Arrogance (oops, see my Kingsfield post);
• Complacency (I’ve never seen any need to worry – the recession isn’t going to have an impact on the public service, right?);
• Pedantry (oops, see my Fulsome Pedantry post).

By way of balance, there is also an article about students’ sins (one of which, at least, has detained me here in the past):

Mind your manners, not the phone, please

Students’ use of mobiles tops the list of uncivil teaching disruptions … They turn up late without doing the required reading and then they sit chatting to their friends, texting or looking bored. Just when you thought you finally had everyone’s full attention, a mobile phone rings, and students start packing up their things 15 minutes before the end of the session. If this sounds familiar, it is because these are among the most common examples of student “incivility” in university lecture and seminar rooms, according to a new study. …

Enough said.

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