Video in the Classroom

One of the activities that I was involved in at the University of Winchester was looking at the possibility of lecture capture in the classroom, accompanied by many questions of cost, intellectual property, and student attendance. A couple of interesting stories in this week’s Times Higher Education deal with this issue:

[BOOK REVIEW] This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things (re online trolling)

This looks really interesting: Why do trolls exist? How can such hostile online behaviour be understood intellectually, culturally and socially? Put another way: is the notorious Pedobear character “lulz” (hilarious) or an ambivalent tour guide through child pornography? For her recent doctorate, communications scholar Whitney Phillips conducted an ethnography of these groups by entering the […]

Internet Addiction Impacting Studies?

Curious about this piece of research: Internet addicts were less motivated to study, according to responses given in the survey. Students with mild or worse internet addiction were judged to be 10 per cent less intrinsically motivated, on average, than those without such a problem. The effect was more marked on internet-addicted students’ self-efficacy, which […]

[Book Review] Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority and Liberal Education in the Digital Age, by Thomas Leitch

This looks worth a read … had many discussions about the use of Wikipedia within academic life … and let’s face it, many of us use it as a first stop… but as I say to students, it shouldn’t be the last stop: In this deceptively slender volume, Leitch gathers a fascinating set of narratives […]

“Good Works” = “Academic Citizenship”

The realities of academic life - more than research and teaching … and incredibly difficult with short-term funding/contracts For Mary Evans, centennial professor at LSE’s Gender Institute, the rewards of fully engaging in these diverse areas of academic life have been personal and political. “For many women of my generation it was very important to […]