Education and Administration – Page 4

“Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence

Is “excellence” really the most efficient metric for distributing the resources available to the world’s scientists, teachers, and scholars? Does “excellence” live up to the expectations that academic communities place upon it? Is “excellence” excellent? And are we being excellent to each other in using it?

During the panel today on Journals in the digital age: penser de nouveaux modèles de publication en sciences humaines at CSDH-SCHN 2020 someone linked to an essay on “Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence in Palgrave Communications (2017). The essay does what should have been done some time ago, it questions the excellence of “excellence” as a value for everything in universities. The very overuse of “excellence” has devalued the concept. Surely much of what we do these days is “good enough” especially as our budgets are cut and cut.

The article has three major parts:

Rhetoric of excellence – it looks at how there is little consensus around what excellence between disciplines. Within disciplines it is negotiated and can become conservative.
Is “excellence” good for research – the second section argues that there is little correlation between forms of excellence review and long term metrics. They go on to outline some of the unfortunate side-effects of the push for excellence; how it can distort research and funding by promoting competition rather than collaboration. They also talk about how excellence disincentivizes replication – who wants to bother with replication if
Alternative narratives – the third section looks at alternative ways of distributing funding. They discuss looking at “soundness” and “capacity” as an alternatives to the winner-takes-all of excellence.

So much more could and should be addressed on this subject. I have often wondered about the effect of the success rates in grant programmes (percentage of applicants funded). When the success rate gets really low, as it is with many NEH programmes, it almost becomes a waste of time to apply and superstitions about success abound. SSHRC has healthier success rates that generally ensure that most researchers gets funded if they persist and rework their proposals.

Hypercompetition in turn leads to greater (we might even say more shameless …) attempts to perform this “excellence”, driving a circular conservatism and reification of existing power structures while harming rather than improving the qualities of the underlying activity.

Ultimately the “adjunctification” of the university, where few faculty get tenure, also leads to hypercompetition and an impoverished research environment. Getting tenure could end up being the most prestigious (and fundamental) of grants – the grant of a research career.

DARIAH Virtual Exchange Event

This morning at 7am I was up participating in a DARIAH VX (Virtual Exchange) on the subject of The Scholarly Primitives of Scholarly Meetings. This virtual seminar was set up when DARIAH’s f2f (face-2-face) meeting was postponed. The VX was to my mind a great example of an intentionally designed virtual event. Jennifer Edmunds and colleagues put together an event meant to be both about and an example of a virtual seminar.

One feature they used was to have us all split into smaller breakout rooms. I was in one on The Academic Footprint: Sustainable methods for knowledge exchange. I presented on Academic Footprint: Moving Ideas Not People which discussed our experience with the Around the World Econferences. I shared some of the advice from the Quick Guide I wrote on Organizing a Conference Online.

Recognize the status conferred by travel
Be explicit about blocking out the time to concentrate on the econference
Develop alternatives to informal networking
Gather locally or regionally
Don’t mimic F2F conferences (change the pace, timing, and presentation format)
Be intentional about objectives of conference – don’t try to do everything
Budget for management and technology support

For those interested we have a book coming out from Open Book Publishers with the title Right Research that collects essays on sustainable research. We have put up preprints of two of the essays that deal with econferences:

The organizers had the following concept and questions for our breakout group.

Session Concept: Academic travel is an expense not only to the institutions and grant budgets, but also to the environment. There have been moves towards open-access, virtual conferences and near carbon-neutral events. How can academics work towards creating a more sustainable environment for research activities?

Questions: (1) How can academics work towards creating a more sustainable environment for research activities? (2) What are the barriers or limitations to publishing in open-access journals and how can we overcome these? (3) What environmental waste does your research produce? Hundreds of pages of printed drafts? Jet fuel pollution from frequent travel? Electricity from powering huge servers of data?

The breakout discussion went very well. In fact I would have had more breakout discussion and less introduction, though that was good too.

Another neat feature they had was a short introduction (with a Prezi available) followed by an interview before us all. The interview format gave a liveliness to the proceeding.

Lastly, I was impressed by the supporting materials they had to allow the discussion to continue. This included the DARIAH Virtual Exchange Event – Exhibition Space for the Scholarly Primitives of Scholarly Meetings.

All told, Dr. Edmonds and DARIAH colleagues have put together a great exemplar both about and of a virtual seminar. Stay tuned for when they share more.

The reason Zoom calls drain your energy

Video chat is helping us stay employed and connected. But what makes it so tiring – and how can we reduce ‘Zoom fatigue’?

Many of us have suspected that videoconferencing is stressful. I tend to blame the stress of poor audio as my hearing isn’t what it used to be. His a story from the BBC on The reason Zoom calls drain your energy. There are a number of factors:

The newness of this way of interacting
The heightened focus needed to deal with missing non-verbal cues.
Heightened focus needed to deal with poor audio.
Need to moderate larger groups so people don’t try to talk at the same time
Audio delays change responsiveness
Stress and time around technical problems.
Silences don’t work the way they do in f2f. They can indicate malfunction.
Being on camera and having to be performative
Lack of separation of home and work
Lack of transition times between meetings (no time to even get up and meet your next appointment at the door)

I hadn’t thought of the role of silence in regular conversations and how we can’t depend on that rhetorically any longer. No dramatic silences any more.

The tech ‘solutions’ for coronavirus take the surveillance state to the next level

Neoliberalism shrinks public budgets; solutionism shrinks public imagination.

Evgeny Morozov has crisp essay in The Guardina on how The tech ‘solutions’ for coronavirus take the surveillance state to the next level. He argues that neoliberalist austerity cut our public services back in ways that now we see are endangering lives, but it is solutionism that constraining our ideas about what we can do to deal with situations. If we look for a technical solution we give up on questioning the underlying defunding of the commons.

There is nice interview between Natasha Dow Shüll Morozov on The Folly of Technological Solutionism: An Interview with Evgeny Morozov in which they talk about his book To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism and gamification.

Back in The Guardian, he ends his essay warning that we should focus on picking between apps – between solutions. We should get beyond solutions like apps to thinking politically.

The feast of solutionism unleashed by Covid-19 reveals the extreme dependence of the actually existing democracies on the undemocratic exercise of private power by technology platforms. Our first order of business should be to chart a post-solutionist path – one that gives the public sovereignty over digital platforms.

Embedded Voyant panel

This post is a demonstration of how a Voyant panel or hermeneutica can be embedded in a WordPress post. See our Voyant tutorials at dialogi.ca.

To embed the panel I created a custom HTML block. In it I pasted the <iframe> element exported from the Voyant panel I wanted. While editing I see the HTML code, when I Preview (either the block or the whole post) or publish then I see the Voyant panel in place. Try playing with it!

Welcome to Dialogica: Thinking-Through Voyant!

Do you need online teaching ideas and materials? Dialogica was supposed to be a text book, but instead we are adapting it for use in online learning and self-study. It is shared here under a CC BY 4.0 license so you can adapt as needed.

Stéfan Sinclair and I have put up a web site with tutorial materials for learning Voyant. See Dialogi.ca: Thinking-Through Voyant!.

Dialogica (http://dialogi.ca) plays with the idea of learning through a dialogue. A dialogue with the text; a dialogue mediated by the tool; and a dialogue with instructors like us.

Dialogica is made up of a set of tutorials that students should be able to alone or with minimal support. These are Word documents that you (instructors) can edit to suit your teaching and we are adding to them. We have added a gloss of teaching notes. Later we plan to add Spyral notebooks that go into greater detail on technical subjects, including how to program in Spyral.

Dialogica is made available with a CC BY 4.0 license so you can do what you want with it as long as you give us some sort of credit.

Endgame for the Humanities?

The academic study of literature is no longer on the verge of field collapse. It’s in the midst of it. Preliminary data suggest that hiring is at an all-time low. Entire subfields (modernism, Victorian poetry) have essentially ceased to exist. In some years, top-tier departments are failing to place a single student in a tenure-track job.

The Chronicle Review has released a free collection on Endgame: Can Literary Studies Survive (PDF) Endgame is a collection of short essays about the collapse of literary studies in the US. The same is probably true of the other fields in the interpretative humanities and social sciences. This collection gives a human face to the important (and depressing) article Benjamin Schmidt wrote in The Atlantic about the decline in humanities majors since 2008, The Humanities Are In Crisis.

Continue reading Endgame for the Humanities?

Codecademy vs. The BBC Micro

The Computer Literacy Project, on the other hand, is what a bunch of producers and civil servants at the BBC thought would be the best way to educate the nation about computing. I admit that it is a bit elitist to suggest we should laud this group of people for teaching the masses what they were incapable of seeking out on their own. But I can’t help but think they got it right. Lots of people first learned about computing using a BBC Micro, and many of these people went on to become successful software developers or game designers.

I’ve just discovered Two-Bit History (0b10), a series of long and thorough blog essays on the history of computing by Sinclair Target. One essay is on Codecademy vs. The BBC Micro. The essay gives the background of the BBC Computer Literacy Project that led the BBC to commission as suitable microcomputer, the BBC Micro. He uses this history to then compare the way the BBC literacy project taught a nation (the UK) computing to the way the Codeacademy does now. The BBC project comes out better as it doesn’t drop immediately into drop into programming without explaining, something the Codecademy does.

I should add that the early 1980s was a period when many constituencies developed their own computer systems, not just the BBC. In Ontario the Ministry of Education launched a process that led to the ICON which was used in Ontario schools in the mid to late 1980s.

The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade

With the end of the year there are some great articles showing up reflecting on debacles of the decade. One of my favorites is The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade. Ed-Tech is one of those fields where over and over techies think they know better. Some of the debacles Watters discusses:

3D Printing
The “Flipped Classroom” (Full disclosure: I sat on a committee that funded these.)
Op-Eds to ban laptops
Clickers
Stories about the end of the library
Interactive whiteboards
The K-12 Cyber Incident Map (Check it out here)
IBM Watson
The Year of the MOOC

This collection of 100 terrible ideas in instructional technology should be mandatory reading for all of us who have been keen on ed-tech. (And I am one who has develop ed-tech and oversold it.) Each item is a mini essay with links worth following.