Always enjoy an evening with Tech For Good – here’s a few tweets from tonight.
Tag: Funding
Dr Bex Lewis and Sarah Penney have been awarded funding for the ESRC Festival of Social Science (November 2017) for the following event, drawing upon Bex’s original PhD research into British Second World War propaganda posters, and Sarah’s current PhD research on nostalgic marketing.
Keep Calm and Stay Nostalgic: why wartime propaganda posters continue to be relevant today?
To raise awareness with young school students about the importance of social sciences and how we as humans interact with the world around us, and create collective behaviours. The themes of the sessions will include: identity, consumer behaviour, nostalgia, memory, propaganda, mass communication and influence.
The event will commence with a lecture/assembly with Dr Bex Lewis and Sarah Penney, presenting their specialist PhD research on wartime propaganda and nostalgic marketing to secondary school students, subjects which they are passionate about sharing with others. The Second World War remains an important part of British identity, and is a recognised study area for secondary education. The event will continue with a hands-on task for pupils to engage with the social science theories presented, drawing upon a resource pack. This interactive session would offer new insights for teachers and students into social science perspectives engaging with up to date research. This will encourage them to think about important moments of their childhood, and the formation of their individual and collective identities.
*See related publication.
Interesting article in the Guardian this weekend – always lots to think about when we think about the purpose of the humanities and/or the way it is funded:
Currently fixed in the crosshairs are the disciplines of the humanities – arts, languages and social sciences – which have suffered swingeing funding cuts and been ignored by a government bent on promoting the modish, revenue-generating Stem (science, technology, engineering, maths) subjects. The liberal education which seeks to provide students with more than mere professional qualifications appears to be dying a slow and painful death, overseen by a whole cadre of what cultural anthropologist David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs”: bureaucrats hired to manage the transformation of universities from centres of learning to profit centres. As one academic put it to me: “Every dean needs his vice-dean and sub-dean and each of them needs a management team, secretaries, admin staff; all of them only there to make it harder for us to teach, to research, to carry out the most basic functions of our jobs.” The humanities, whose products are necessarily less tangible and effable than their science and engineering peers (and less readily yoked to the needs of the corporate world) have been an easy target for this sprawling new management class.
Read full article.
Categories
Crowdfund your own job?
Well, this is a fascinating idea:
In what is thought to be a first for a UK university, Portsmouth will hire a scholar to research crowdfunding, the process of securing investment by appealing to the public for donations. But an initial two-year contract will be extended only if the fellow can personally raise cash towards the post’s salary costs.
“Because of the nature of the successful applicant’s research, we’re hoping they can practise what they preach and secure some funding to continue their work,” said Joe Cox, an economist who leads a team that has won a £750,000 grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to research the intricacies of crowdfunding.
Read full story.
Categories
Innovating Pedagogy?
Interesting piece on where technology may possibly make changes to UK Higher Ed:
While 2012 was dubbed the “year of the Mooc”, 2013 will be remembered as the “year of the crowd”, according to the co-author of a report on emerging technologies with the potential to disrupt higher education.
The Open University report Innovating Pedagogy 2013 looks at six fledgling technological approaches that could revolutionise teaching, and also reviews the progress of four more established ideas including massive open online courses and learning analytics.
Among the emerging technologies are “crowd learning”, which involves harnessing the local knowledge of many people to answer questions, and “citizen inquiry”, which refers to mass public participation in structured investigations such as mapping climate change or recording bird populations.
Read full article.