Category — Higher Education

Folks;

In June 2004 a workshop on Mentoring in Engineering was held at Stanford with the joint support of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM, administered by the NSF and funded by the White House) and the Stanford School of

Engineering. The two day workshop brought together graduate students and all levels of faculty for presentations and discussions on the needs, goals, methods, and best practices for mentoring students, junior faculty, and mid level faculty for academic careers. The emphasis was on mentoring members of underrepresented groups in academic engineering, especially women, but most of the topics are common to all interested in academic engineering careers. An excerpt on Women Professors With Children appears below followed by a copy of the table of contents of the proceedings. The full Workshop Proceedings are available at the workshop website http://paesmem.stanford.edu/ in both pdf format for printing and html

format for Web viewing.

Publishing crisis: “

The MLA’s Profession 2004 features four essays on the ‘crisis in publishing’ by Judith Ryan, Philip Lewis, Jennifer Crewe, and Domna C. Stanton. All of the essays converge on a number of key points:

——-snip———

• Tenure requirements need rethinking. Somehow.

—–

jeremy:
i think this isn’t the place for intervention. the place for intervention is the production of ph.d.’s, the use of ph.d. students as a labor force and parallel to that the adjunctification of the humanities. The overproduction of ph.d.’s will keep the requirements for tenure high. the growing research competition will also likely increase the requirement on the humanities and humanities departments. why would you tenure a humanities person with only one book? when your standards in engineering are one patent or more…? it is a losing game of increasing expectations.

——

Missing from this discussion, as far as I could tell, were the $20,000 questions: why publish? To what end? Would the quality of academic scholarship go up if we expected books later in a career, instead of sooner? If scholarship is a conversation, with whom are we conversing? And to whom are we speaking? To what extent do ‘hot topics’ have an academic audience? How can we determine what scholarship has lasting merit, when it’s often the case that we won’t be able to tell for years (or decades?)? Who determines what constitutes ‘quality’? How well does peer review succeed in its aims? And, to bring in rational choice for a moment, will academic publishers who expect us to buy their books ever start pricing books cheaply enough for us to buy them–without foregoing that month’s gas bill, that is? Merely adjusting the numbers required for tenure–numbers of books, numbers of articles–leaves the core issues untouched.

“

(Via The Little Professor.)

——

we publish to compete. as for cost, the costs for publishers will skyrocket because everything is pushing them that way.

The Growth and Development of Humanities Computing – Martyn Jessop, Ubiquity: “The application of computing to research problems in the humanities is not new. One of the acknowledged pioneers in this area, Father Robert Busa, began his work on the Index Thomisticus (an index to the works of the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas”

(Via Online Learning Update.)

—-

textual computing is more what this seems to focus on…. i think there is much much more. this admits more, but when you talk about projects…. they tend to center on texual or textualizing data….

A new environment for learning?: “

If
you find yourself with some extra time over the next few days and are
feeling adventurous, you should set aside a moment or two and try out
the beta version of Croquet.

Croquet is a 3-D rendered
‘operating system’ and provides an environment for navigating through,
and representing, information. Users are represented by the
avatar of their choice (I ended up as a rabbit) and can wander through
different spaces. When I saw a demonstration earlier this year,
Croquet allowed users to navigate around in the rendered environment,
find and communicate with others and access their favourite desktop
applications from within the Croquet world.

Croquet is open
source and links computers through peer to peer communications.
It does not need a lot of infrastructure; I saw it working on a pair of
computers linked with an ethernet cable. My first exposure to
Croquet left me dumbfounded. It defies definition and must be
experienced.

Be forewarned – Croquet is really still a
beta. Documentation is sparse to non-existent and the people most
likely to benefit from playing with Croquet (in its current form) are
those who can troubleshoot code. Nevertheless, the application
has great promise and the potential to change the way we do many
things. One of its first possible uses is in creating 3-D
simulations (not unlike Ancient Spaces). Other potential applications include community and social environments as well as collaboration spaces.

You can get more information at http://www.opencroquet.org. I would love to hear what uses you find for Croquet!

“

(Via EDUCAUSE Blogs -.)

‘

learning environment?

perhaps….

State: Chiropractic school angers FSU professors: “A growing number of professors in the Florida State University College of Medicine are saying they will resign if FSU administrators continue to pursue a proposed chiropractic school.

‘I would no longer wish to volunteer my teaching energies to FSU medical school, should it encompass a school of chiropractic,’ wrote Dr. Ian Rogers, an assistant professor at FSU’s Pensacola campus, in a Dec. 15 e-mail. ‘This is plainly ludicrous!!!!’

The threatened resignations – at least seven to date, all from assistant professors who work part time – reflect a belief among many in the medical establishment that chiropractic is a ‘pseudo-science’ that leads to unnecessary and sometimes harmful treatments. Professors are even circulating a parody map of campus that places a fictional Bigfoot Institute, School of Astrology and Crop Circle Simulation Laboratory near a future chiropractic school.”

(Via .)

—–

it just makes me want to read ’society must be defended’ all over again…

7 assistant professors who work part time…… determine what a pseudo-science is… all i know is that i have friends that swear by chiropracty, and they seem happy enough.

Digital Learning Cultures in the Information Landscape – Clifford Lynch, Syllabus Keynote: “As executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information, Clifford Lynch has an exceptional view of the changing landscape of information in the digital realm. In these excerpts from his July 19 keynote at Syllabus2004, Lynch takes a look at t”

(Via Online Learning Update.)

—-

this brings up some oft forgotten issues and questions.

Grow up already!: “

In my referrer logs today is this gem of a search: ‘what+if+i+am+not+accepted+by+grad+school’

The world will end if you are not accepted by grad school. You will end up toothless and cold under a bridge with passersby spitting on you from above. Your life will be empty and meaningless.

Sheesh. If you don’t have an answer to this question, you don’t have any business applying to grad school.

“

(Via Caveat Lector.)

——-

it’s true you know. of course… it isn’t much different than if you go to grad school, so take your chances.

Student loan update, and some thoughts on Deleuzian networks of control: “Yesterday the Royal Bank returned the money they withdrew from my bank accounts.

Since sending my letter on Tuesday, the CBC has been the only news source to publish it and the Royal Bank the only institution to contact me. Of course I didn’t expect to change the world in three days, but I am a bit disappointed and disheartened that no one else I contacted considered my experience and concerns either news-worthy or significant enough to respond.

—-snip—-

Deleuze got it right: we no longer live in Foucault’s disciplinary society; we live in societies of control.

‘In the societies of control … what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code… The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become ‘dividuals,’ and masses, samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’ … The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network … Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt…’

—–snip—-
This type of control is particularly insidious because there is no panopticon. Control is diffuse and we can’t locate – or fix – responsibility and accountability long enough to affect change. And it’s particularly dangerous because it allows each of us to play the victim of an imaginary structure.”

(Via Purse Lip Square Jaw.)

—–

Anne Hits it on the head as usual. this is the same thing that is happening in the u.s. in regards to anything ’security’ the imaginary structure powered by an inability to imagine difference, fixes us, into a system of normalcy that may in fact not function for any parties, but yet still controls all parties.

Hypertext 3.0: “

I just heard the good news that Johns Hopkins Press will be publishing George Landow’s Hypertext 3.0 next year. V

“

(Via Mark Bernstein.)

—-

cool

Declaration from Buenos Aires – Social Forum of Information 2004: “Information, knowledge, documentation, archives, and libraries are communal cultural goods and resources. They are based upon and promoted by democratic values, such as: freedom, equality, and social justice, as well as tolerance, respect, equity, solidarity, communities, society, and the dignity of individuals.

Every documentation center contributes to democratic practice in the social and political spheres. Conscious of this dimension, the foundation and organization of these cultural goods and resources must be constructed under the principal of knowledge and information access that is free, open, and egalitarian for everybody.

Social and political elements also are present that librarians, documentalists, and archivists must take into account in order to contribute to the formation of cultural and civic identities sustained by civil and socially responsible values.
“

——–

this is important stuff…