drbexl.co.uk » 2011

#HD12

Posted on: 31-12-2011

On The Big Bible Project this morning we ran a story about the hashtag we’re seeking to get going, #HD12, which stands for Hopes & Dreams for 2012.

2011

2011 has been a difficult year. In February 2009 I qualified as a Life Coach, aspects of which have affected much of my practice within work, but also my life itself. Two quotes which stuck with me from the sessions:

“There’s no point painting the wall if it needs knocking down”.
“Sometimes you have to go through the shit, it’s just a case of finding a way of landing in 3ft, rather than 6ft of shit”.

Shortly afterwards I was put on antidepressants (yes, I know we’re not supposed to talk about that, but how are we supposed to support people in dealing with it if we don’t accept that it’s an illness that needs treatment), and started to meet with a counsellor to talk through how my life is the way it is…

Who gets depression?

It’s partly because I have been told so many times “you’re the last person I would have thought suffered from depression” that I thought I’d write this …

This Christmas I picked up Christopher Cantopher ‘The Curse of the Strong‘, a book that many others had identified as particularly helpful and this assessment of the ‘personality type’ that he identifies as most likely to struggle is striking (not the ‘should pull their socks up’ kinda person):

(moral) strength
reliability
diligence
strong conscience
strong sense of reliability
a tendency to focus on the needs of others before one’s own
sensitivity
vulnerability to criticism
self-esteem dependent on the evaluation of others (I’m not so sure about that one)

He identifies how depression, so often classified as a ‘mental disorder’ can actually be identified as a physical disorder, with the synaptic nerves in the limbic system under so much pressure that they snap … and need time to heal:

http://www.uniview.co.uk/acatalog/info_8_1057.html

Things need to heal properly before putting too much pressure back on … otherwise relapse, potentially worse, will occur… Currently, I’m still on mine… it allows me to continue to be Bex…

Failing Well

A couple of great quotes from Cantopher’s book:

Now, what’s really hard but correspondingly rewarding is to fail well. This means taking on a range of tasks, experiences and challenges, understanding that you will win some and lost some, forgiving yourself your failures and learning from them. This way you develop a life that is rich in texture and free from fear.

followed up by:

While I had succeeded in avoiding failure, he had embraced it, with the result that he had a new skill, at which he was clearly having a great time. In order to achieve success that is worthwhile and wide-ranging, you must first learn to fail well. Every happy person I have met has achieved this. It doesn’t though, mean making your life a struggle to achieve the impossible.

Making Decisions

On my Christmas/New Year holiday in Egypt last year I knew I had to make a big decision… not as a New Year Resolution (I don’t make those, if life coaching has taught me anything else, it’s that we need to make changes when the time is right, not at some random time in the calendar, although time off in the New Year can help us take time to think) … but moving forward… I’ve made huge steps in 2011… but I’m not good at congratulating myself! In many ways, I should congratulate myself that I managed to have nearly 6 days doing ‘nothing’ over Christmas, but instead I’m looking at what I still haven’t finished for 2011, and stressing about 2012!

So, what ARE my hopes and dreams for 2012?

Anyway, this was the original plan for my post… so what do I know I have to look forward to in 2012:

Getting my paperwork (physical and digital) sorted… including my websites…
Move PhD towards publication (with help from Martin Polley), along with other writing (including a book with @MarkHowe)
Get lots of people involved in #BigRead12 with Tom Wright for Lent
Working with @adamswbrown in getting the @bigbible site sorted, incorporating @biblefresh
The Great South Run (October) and having fun down the gym
Berlin with Erika, and seeing lots more of my friends, and working out more fun travel!
Speaking engagements with CofE, in Dresden, with #DigiLocal (see here)
Housegroup: Walks, The Scillies, Paralympics
Greenbelt (August Bank Holiday)
Conferences (they are fun!): Thinking Digital, PELECon12, ALTC12, CNMAC12, JISCEL12 (see 2011).
Enjoying my Winchester work: JISC projects, training, teaching

I’ll probably remember more, but for now… let’s get some fresh air!!

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Happy Christmas e-Card

Posted on: 24-12-2011

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Category : drbexl

Tags: 2012, christmas, E-Card

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-h0IYWWmEHAw/Tu9CB06bB5I/AAAAAAAACa4/AfSbp65JIi4/s1600/the%2Bstory%2Bof%2Bchristmas%2B%2528infographic%2529.png

Hurrah, I thought I wasn’t even going to get around to my e-card this year (it’s been so hectic… and just think this time last year I’d been scuba diving in the Red Sea, and then climbing Mount Sinai to watch the sun rise on Christmas Day), but I’ve had a couple of inspirational images sent this morning (don’t you just love this one above), so I wanted to say HAPPY CHRISTMAS to everyone…

This year I’m looking forward to staying in Winchester (I’ve realised in the past 5 years this will be my 2nd in Winchester, others have been in Australia, Egypt and Switerzerland!) with the Hitchens.. will be fun! Heading over there before too long, and looking forward to Midnight Communion at CCW.

If you haven’t already joined it, there’s an online ‘crowd-sourced’ carol service run today – find out more about it here: http://bigbible.org.uk/2011/12/are-you-joining-onlinecarols/ … currently live at http://onlinecarols.posterous.com/, but will remain online if you fancy joining later… just use hashtag #onlinecarols if you tweet about it.

There’s so much great stuff online this year – check out this post commissioned from Rev Joanne Cox on The Big Bible Project!

Now, of course I need to reference ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’, and thanks to @goannatree for alerting me to this one:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=309483909091336&set=a.143365612369834.15035.104839619555767&type=1&theater

Now, 2011 has been a tough year, but lots of things to be thankful for also! This is the year that you need to encourage me to get my PhD published, and #keepbexrunning for The Great South Run (10 miles) in October…

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I sit in a UK Library…

Posted on: 24-12-2011

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Category : Academic

Tags: Times Higher Education

http://bic.org/home-stories?b_start:int=30

One that made me think… what these students are fighting for to get an education, when in the UK students often want it on a plate…

Once, during Ramadan in the mid-1990s, Erfan Sabeti was on his way to an all-day genetics class at the Baha’i Institute for Higher Education in Tehran.

He had taken to wearing a tie to show he was not a hard-liner, though the Ayatollah Khomeini had just issued a fatwa saying that ties were a symbol of westernisation. As he was about to get into a taxi, he was stopped by revolutionary guards.

Young and fearless at the time, Sabeti immediately told them he was a Baha’i going to a meeting, where the accepted costume was suit and tie. So they took him to their headquarters and one of them said: “You Baha’is are very cheeky, because we’ve got you ‘on our tongue’. We could swallow you up whenever we wanted, if it wasn’t for pressure from the international community.”

“They interrogated me for three or four hours,” Sabeti recalls now, “cut my tie and fined me about £5. By lunchtime they let me go. My professor was very worried and almost fainted when I told the story, because of the risk that I’d been followed.”

“Mona” (not her real name) also remembers that she and fellow students of the BIHE had to keep the location of classes and labs secret in order to avoid raids by the government.

“We were particularly cautious about the labs, because we didn’t want our textbooks, equipment, photocopiers, computers and teaching materials to be confiscated.”

So what exactly is the BIHE? Why has it long been a target of official hostility in Iran, subject to a notable crackdown in 1998 and now under even more severe threat?

Read full story.

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We are the 98%?

Posted on: 23-12-2011

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Category : Academic

Tags: #occupy, Times Higher Education

http://obeygiant.com/images/2011/11/Occupy-HOPE-poster-final-rnd2-V2-500x752.jpg

Having participated on the fringes of #occupy, this story attracted my interest (and the poster above uses a number of iconic memes!):

The Occupy movement is a disparate yet articulate protest movement directed against economic and social inequality. Although it has not rushed to make demands, it has galvanised support with the slogan “The 99 per cent”, referring to the concentration of wealth among the top 1 per cent of income earners. As a meme, “Occupy” has propagated far and wide, but it does not appear to have gained as much traction as one might have thought among those at university. This is not 1968. Like structuralism then, the mass of students today are not taking to the streets.

Occupy Wall Street came to an unglamorous end in mid-November, and the clock is officially ticking for the camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral in London. One protester I met in the “Information Tent” at St Paul’s was pragmatic. All the tents, he explained, would be removed as soon as the court ruling decreed. But I was also told that the idea of Occupy will remain steadfast.

During a lecture, I wrote on the board “#ows”, the Twitter hashtag then circulating in relation to Occupy Wall Street. I asked if anyone recognised it. Out of some 60 media undergraduates – many of them Twitter users – not one knew. And even when told, a less-than-excited murmur rippled through the room. Despite a number of high-profile scholars lending support to the Occupy movement, little interest has registered across the other 99 per cent of the university population.

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Credit for Science Work?

Posted on: 22-12-2011

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Category : Academic

Tags: Awards, Citation, Credit

This was an interesting article… as someone who enjoys working in a team… but also wants credit for my work, I’m not sure this only applies to the sciences:

Professor Hoffmann, an emeritus distinguished class research director with the French National Research Agency (CNRS) in Strasbourg, shared half this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with US immunologist Bruce Beutler “for their discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity”.

But, as reported in Times Higher Education last week, Bruno Lemaitre, a professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, has claimed that he was largely responsible for the Nobel-winning project while he was a postdoctoral researcher in Professor Hoffmann’s lab in the early 1990s.

According to the website set up by Professor Lemaitre, Professor Hoffmann was “far from the realities of experimental bench work” and had contributed little to the project, which examined fruit flies’ immunity to fungal infections.

Professor Hoffmann’s contribution, it says, was limited to discussing results and helping to write later drafts of the resulting Cell paper, published in 1996.

So how, 15 years later, did the Nobel prize come to be awarded to Professor Hoffmann?

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Oxford College achieves 84% State Sector Entry

Posted on: 17-12-2011

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Category : Academic

Tags: Oxford, university

http://alfonsoandchristinescelebration.co.uk/graphics/mansfieldcollege.jpg

Following on from yesterday’s post, this one is of particular interest – as Oxford/Cambridge always have had higher numbers from the private sector:

Principal at an Oxford college might not seem a natural job for a Glaswegian from a working-class background who has spent much of her life waging war on social injustice and educational disadvantage.

But Mansfield College – known as the dissenters’ college – is not like its University of Oxford counterparts and for its new head, barrister and Labour peer Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws, it was a fitting home.

Established in the 19th century as the first college for religious Nonconformists, Mansfield is now blazing a trail for fair access – it offered 84.5 per cent of its places to students from the state sector this year. More than two-thirds of these came from further education, sixth-form colleges or comprehensive schools.

“People’s jaws drop when they hear that,” Baroness Kennedy said. “If I’ve got 84 per cent, someone sitting here in Oxford has got a very bad story to tell.”

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Super-Selection Policies?

Posted on: 16-12-2011

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Category : Academic

Tags: Access, AimHigher, university

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/414510

Selection of students for universities – a topic of great interest – are we just allowing those who would always have gone to find a way in, or are we offering widening access:

There are many disturbing aspects of current policies towards higher education, but one of the most disturbing has attracted relatively little comment compared with funding reforms, student financial support or access to visas for overseas students. It is the growing obsession with the stratification of universities by the A-level grades their students attain.

The new conventional wisdom is that students with high A-level grades should all be corralled into so-called “top” universities, ie, those that are research intensive. These universities are deemed to be successful by being not just selective, but super-selective in their student recruitment. Now, every newspaper league table of universities heavily weights the input measure of students’ entry qualifications, encouraging universities to be ever more focused on candidates with three As or better. This fixation has a number of unfortunate consequences.

Of these, by far the most important is that the intake of universities becomes less and less diverse. Very high A-level scores can be and indeed are achieved by some young people from all social and ethnic groups. However, there is a large preponderance of private school-educated, upper-middle-class students with these scores, which reflects the advantages of their schooling and their family backgrounds. One indicator is the tiny number of British black and Asian students at Oxbridge and the concentration of such students in post-1992 inner-city universities. Another sign is the under-representation of mature students in some universities and their concentration in others, partly because they have taken fewer A levels than 18-year-old candidates, or in many cases none at all.

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Cinema: Hugo

Posted on: 15-12-2011

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Category : Just for Fun

Tags: Cinema, Early Cinema, film

This evening I’ve been to see Hugo - an interesting film, and a lot was explained once I saw that Johnny Depp was behind the film! You can see the trailer here:

Read more about the film on IMDB, and read more about the story of Georges Méliès, the inspiration for the film, and see one of his famous films:

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The X-Factor: Real?

Posted on: 15-12-2011

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Category : Academic

Tags: Reality, X-Factor

An interesting, if philosophically deep, article:

In 1988, Fredric Jameson wrote – half in mourning, half in warning – of a contemporary “world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible…all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum”. If 1980s postmodernism was a hall of mirrors, recycling and reflecting the past, Wembley Arena on the night of The X Factor final is a fractured mosaic, a spinning mirrorball of snatched images thrown up on the big screen. The irony is as thick as the fog thrown up by the dry ice. Dermot O’Leary urges the crowd to vote for the winner, although the guest appearances are from JLS (runners-up, 2008) in a mash-up with One Direction (runners-up, 2010), hosted by Olly Murs (runner-up in 2009). Every loser wins, it seems, and yet the audience is told repeatedly that fame rests on this final performance.

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Research collaboration?

Posted on: 08-12-2011

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Category : Academic

Tags: Funding, Higher Education, Unity

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/889293

As someone who’s keen on collaboration, working in unity, etc, this is a story of concern:

The concentration of research funding in a few elite universities has been described as a “policy trap” that fails to reflect the modern trend towards wider academic collaboration.

Sir David Watson, professor of higher education and principal of Green Templeton College, Oxford, said policymakers were ignoring the fact that researchers were increasingly working across institutions and national borders.

In a speech due to be delivered at the annual conference of the Society for Research into Higher Education, of which he is honorary president, on 7 December, he said that there was already a “stark conclusion” that funding had been concentrated in the UK “to the point where it has become dysfunctional”.

But the issue was also reinforcing an obsession – among vice-chancellors, politicians and funding bodies – with institutional competition, rather than with the real world of partnerships.

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#HD12

2011

Who gets depression?

Failing Well

Making Decisions

So, what ARE my hopes and dreams for 2012?

Happy Christmas e-Card

I sit in a UK Library…

We are the 98%?

Credit for Science Work?

Oxford College achieves 84% State Sector Entry

Super-Selection Policies?

Cinema: Hugo

The X-Factor: Real?

Research collaboration?

Sponsor Me?

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