Ways forward

Known Assailants Stalking the white working class from within

In academia, an article that is 10 years old is considered dated.

Blogging highlights the process, not the output – one of my early blogging chums was Tony Hirst here at the OU. He has commented that blogging reveals an ongoing process of research, but that much of our formal systems (promotion, REF, research funding) are focused on outputs. That’s not to say outputs aren’t important, but the longitudinal picture that a blog gives you allows for a better representation of developing ideas.

Most early hospitalist groups formed in community hospitals. Over the past 5 years, many academic medical centers have adopted hospitalist models for inpatient care and teaching. Beyond the legitimacy that this expansion into academia affords the movement,68 the 2 greatest effects are on education and research.69 Academic hospitalists are emerging as core teachers of inpatient medicine. For example, at the University of California, San Francisco, 15 faculty hospitalists now staff about two thirds of ward-attending months and all medical consult months. Preliminary evidence indicates that resident teaching evaluations of hospitalists are significantly higher than those of our highly selected nonhospitalist 1-month-per-year ward attendings (K. Hauer, MD, written communication, December 2001), an effect seen elsewhere as well.32 The impact on medical student education has not been empirically studied; we recently described several potential advantages and disadvantages of hospitalists in student education.70 The development of hospitalist groups in academic medical centers may have its most far-reaching effects in defining a new research agenda.69 No longer limiting their research to the impact of the hospitalist model itself, academic hospitalists are now applying the tools of health services and outcomes research, ethics, and clinical epidemiology to critical inpatient issues, such as preventing nosocomial infections,71 end-of-life care,72 and hospital quality measurement.46 Over time, hospitalists are likely to become increasingly engaged in patient-centered research, clinical trials, and genetic epidemiology (BOX 2), taking advantage of their onsite availability and large numbers of potential subjects. Box 2. Clinical Research That Might Be Undertaken by Academic Hospitalists, Beginning With Those Areas Already Under Study 1. Studies of the efficiency, cost, and quality of hospitalist services. 2. Studies of new approaches to systems issues that arise in and around the hospital (eg, medical errors, pain management, palliative care, inpatient-outpatient communication). 3. Clinical trials (single site or multicenter) involving diseases that hospitalists commonly encounter (eg, pneumonia, sepsis, gastrointestinal bleeding, heart failure, thromboembolism, asthma). 4. Multicenter trials involving interventions with smaller expected benefits or less common diseases. 5. Multicenter studies of the etiology of disease and disease susceptibility (eg, genetic analyses of why some patients become severely ill with pneumococcal pneumonia while exposed family members do not).

Manos Avgeridis

The paradox of resistance: critique, neoliberalism, and the limits of performativity

Varieties of neoliberalism, varieties of critique?

Relatedly, given the level of agreement among academics about the general direction of these changes, engagement with developing long-term, sustainable alternatives to exploitative modes of knowledge production has been surprisingly scattered.

Scholars still have a lot of anxiety about this practice. Many of those relate to the university careers and workplaces: evaluation, tenure, reactions from their peers, hallway jealousy, and so on. These are real worries, and as a scholar and university professor myself, I empathize with many of them.

The internet has made it easier than ever to reach a lot of readers quickly. It has birthed new venues for publication and expanded old ones. At the same time, a sense of urgency of current affairs, from politics to science, technology to the arts, has driven new interest in bringing scholarship to the public directly.

When I see a paper that I find interesting, I make sure to send the author an e-mail or message them on Twitter. I say: “I just read your paper — it helped me with some concepts. I look forward to seeing your future work.” It lets people know that they have worth.

I’m part of the policy working group for an international professional network called the Marie Curie Alumni Association. I’d like the working group to have a new mission: aligning the incentives and rewards of science with the type of work and productivity that we really want to see. We need to better reward non-traditional outcomes, such as data sets, research methods and code. And we need to better appreciate activities outside of the lab, such as public engagement, education and outreach. That’s the way towards achieving substantial and lasting change.

Everyone is publishing and publishing because that’s where the money in science comes from. But if everyone is publishing and nobody is reading, are we making a contribution?

decolonization of knowledge and research methodology point to critical areas of reflection for researchers, regardless of the context of their work.

Se trataría de inventar prácticas de contra-diseño que puedan mantener un compromiso duradero con proyectos de vida politizados. ¿Podrá la educación del diseño cumplir esta misión? Los conocimientos académicos, fundados bajo el imperativo firme de la separación del mundo natural, parecieran ser completamente incompetentes para proveernos con los conocimientos en sintonía con la Tierra necesarios para que los humanos funcionemos acoplados con ella. Tampoco parecen ser capaces de acoger los conocimientos lugarizados y vernáculos de las culturas que se rehúsan a rendirse al mundo globalizado, manteniendo su sabiduría del habitar y de enraizar sus mundos.

¿no es la universidad una de las fuerzas más eficaces de ocupación ontológica de las vida y de los territorios de la gente, junto con el Estado, la economía, la Policía y los ejércitos? ¿Será capaz la academia de superar la cultura de la profesionalización del conocimiento experto tan desacreditada por Illich, de tal forma que pueda apoyar miradas conviviales? ¿Lograrán los diseñadores y aquellos dedicados a la recomunalización de la vida ‘escapar de la educación’ de tal forma que puedan diseñar “desde las culturas de base” (Prakash y Esteva 2008) para las cuales la educación convencional no puede sino devaluar sus conocimientos y vidas? Hay, sin duda, muchas respuestas a estas preguntas, desde renunciar a la universidad como espacio para la afirmación de la vida hasta luchar por su pluralización epistémica, especialmente frente a la incesante presión para que la universidad adopte cada vez más modelos corporativos al servicio del mundo globalizado.

la mayoría de las principales universidades, tal vez en el mundo, se están doblegando ante las presiones para capacitar a las personas con el fin de ser ‘exitosas’ en un ‘mundo cada vez más globalizado e interconectado’, lo que significa preparar ‘individuos’ para competir en una economía de mercado; estos son los mismos individuos que llevarán a cabo el mandato de la insostenibilidad y la desfuturización

. Como Maturana y Varela señalaran con referencia a la forma como concibieron el novedoso concepto de autopoiesis, “no podíamos escapar de estar inmersos en una tradición [la racionalista] pero con un lenguaje adecuado podíamos orientarnos de manera diferente y, tal vez, desde la nueva perspectiva generar una nueva tradición” (1980: xvii). La novedad de su trabajo reside, precisamente, en haber inventado un nuevo léxico para hablar de la existencia biológica, en particular sobre la cognición, como veremos en el último capítulo

El diseño está inextricablemente ligado a las decisiones sobre el tipo de vidas que vivimos y los mundos donde las vivimos; estas son cuestiones normativas que la academia usualmente rehúye, dada su predilección por la neutralidad: “La pregunta que los humanos debemos enfrentar dice Maturana, [a quien recurriré en secciones posteriores] es qué queremos que pase con nosotros, no una cuestión de conocimiento o de progreso”

“These phenomena make it difficult to interpret the results.”

Excerpt from the UBC Guide to Reappointment, Promotion and Tenure Procedures (RPT): Evidence of educational leadership is required for tenure/promotion in the Educational Leadership stream… It can include, but is not limited to…Contributions to the practice and theory of teaching and learning literature, including publications in peer-reviewed and professional journals, conference publications, book chapters, textbooks and open education repositories / resources.

Emden, C. (1998). Establishing a ‘track record’: Research productivity and nursing academe.Australian Journal of Advanced Nursing,16(1), 29–33

Responses to Ed Folsom's "Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives

That summer was the first time he rented an inexpensive cottage on Gotts, a remote island off the coast of Maine; it lacked running water and electricity but was covered in pine forests and romantic mists. There, he wrote Levin, he was “reading nothing more frivolous than Plotinus and Husserl,” and Harry was welcome to join him “if Wellfleet becomes too worldly.”

I am still an outsider running an underground railway and I am needing folks to guide me: is this connectedcourses System A or a well-disguised System B.

The Academy won't save us. 

I was in Nancy in November 2010, for a conference which I blogged about in "What are you?".

I felt, perhaps wrongly as a result of my own fear, that I wasn't in the company of learners.

I was in Clermont in 2008, a maverick, to talk about using social networks in teaching 

This is not to say that those of us in higher ed are immune from market forces,

whose story are we telling 'objectively'?

How can we, instead, meta-communicate liberation and possibility?

While networked peer-to-peer mentoring may appear mundane and time consuming, in harkening back to Noddings’ concept of an ethic of care, we argue these connections and conversations should not be overlooked but cultivated, celebrated, and studied.

More significantly, I believe, schools are losing an ability to matter, to influence things in the real world. If we are to change this, we academics must begin to rethink the arcane conventions that govern our way of being in this world. The traditional protocols of attribution, vetting, and credentialing have helped to preserve, protect, and maintain a closed and gated academic community. It may be safe, but it is also detached and, in many ways, infantilized and absurd.

Results of our analysis show that there has been a consistent growth in the number of articles published over the past decade; from 1.3 million in 2003 to 2.4 million in 2013 (see Figure 1). At the same time, the number of authorships has increased at a far greater rate from 4.6 million in 2003 to 10 million in 2013.

‘academic’ in the contemporary sense, and so co-designed, collaborative, located on the ground, and outputting accumulated learning through numerous channels.

McGill’s Dr. Sterne calls it “the gamification of research,”

“I don’t trust academia.edu,”

the platform essentially bans access for academics who, for whatever reason, don’t have an Academia.edu account. It also shuts out non-academics.

35 million academics, independent scholars and graduate students as users, who collectively have uploaded some eight million texts

Simply saying competition is divisive won’t raise standards for collaboration, and won’t create the grounds for hope. To do this, we urgently need to start collecting new stories and evidence of a different culture forged in kindness, that we know we can build together. Then maybe we need to start making our own videos.

I told them you could work 60 hours a week, never take a holiday or weekend off, have internationally regarded publications – lots of them, write textbooks, be a great teacher, and managers will still ask for more. And more. I told them you are measured only by what you have not managed to achieve, not what you have achieved, never mind how valuable or prestigious.

 In effect, the status of an academic has slid from institutional asset to indentured servant.

A coalition of some of the world’s key scholarly publishers, platforms, libraries, and technology organizations

BCcampus as a whole is a research project in the eyes of our parent institution SFU

Annotation in academic settings

The scholarly community

Davidson shocked his professors by taking off for India to explore meditation practice and Buddhist teachings. After three months there and in Sri Lanka, he came back convinced he would do meditation research. He was quickly disabused of this notion by his professors, who let him know that if he had any hope of a career in science, he’d better stow the meditation and follow a more conventional path of research. He became a closet meditator and an affective neuroscientist—a deep student of the emotions.

academia.edu