Anecdotes out of academia
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Acknowledgement: This material was sourced from The Australian newspaper and its weekly Higher Education Supplement.
Flying Pigs: Student recruitment goes to the next level (December 2007)
Schoolies recovering from their weekend excesses at Lorne in Victoria
last week woke to the sounds of not just frogs and dogs but flying pigs.
Deakin University's vice-chancellor Sally Walker had arranged for an aeroplane pulling a banner with the words Fly high at Deakin Uni to cruise above the coastal resorts of southwest Victoria, including Lorne, which is inundated with schoolies.
Just
to make sure that even students with hangovers got the message, veteran
pilot Ralph Geary mounted a huge speaker on one of his wheel
struts. I use the animal noises to attract people's attention, Geary says, according to Snitch's correspondent Warwick Hatfield. That
way you can be pretty well guaranteed they get the message.
People might ignore the sound of an aeroplane but they definitely sit
up when it starts making noises like a pig.
The world's most overdue library books (November 2007)
[ From The Australian, 12 Nov 2007, page 14 ]
Chile
has returned 3778 books that its military had taken from Peru's
national library. Most are in excellent condition, but they are
more than 126 years overdue.
Chilean soldiers pillaged the
library in 1881 after capturing the Peruvian capital, Lima, during the
1879-1883 War of the Pacific. The volumes, written in Greek,
Latin, French and Spanish, some with full-page colonial-era maps, dated
from the 16th to 19th centuries.
[ How many demerit points, we wonder? ]
EXCLUSIVE: Monster koala seen on campus! (October 2007)
Among those human-made objects that can be seen from space - such as
the pyramids of Egypt and the Great Wall of China, according to NASA -
add the Great Koala of Armidale.
But be quick to get up there and take a look: the koala is cut into a paddock and will regrow soon.
It is the project of University of New England school of geography
and planning teacher Paul Frazier, who set it for his students in UNE's
unit on remote sensing and surveying. They used global positioning
satellite and geographical information systems technology to plot the
picture, then followed with herbicide spray, a mower and mattocks and
spades.
A dog mown and sprayed into the same paddock last year was visible
from passing satellites, Frazier says. The koala - and a gum leaf - are
about 400m from top to bottom and should also be visible from way up. A
satellite image should be available in about a month.
Harry Potter goes to Canberra (August 2007)
Curses and spells may soon fly between the National Union of Students and federal Education Minister Julie Bishop after
debate between the two sides degenerated into name calling from the
pages of Harry Potter.
The union has declared itself to be Dumbledore's Army
working against the evil Dolores Umbridge (Bishop) who tries to take
over Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Bishop, in response,
declared the union was, in fact, the equally evil House of Slytherin.
An
angered Dumbledore's Army hastily sent off a press release declaring
the minister should explain herself. From the perspective of students,
Julie Bishop is much more like Dolores Umbridge and the ministry of
magic than the National Union of Students is like Slytherin, it read.
It is good to see debate about significant policy issues being
conducted by grown-ups. What Snitch wants to know is: Who is the Harry
Potter of higher education?
Say that again? (October 2007)
The Australian newspaper operates the weekly Talking Turkeys awards for bad journalism.
The October 25 winner of the Talking Turkeys is The Australian Financial Review, for its description of new technology at university:
Virtual worlds are the new testbed for flexible learning at
Australian universities, despite limitations that couple bandwidth and
security constraints with unrealistic and deserted territories in
simulated environments.
OK, got that?
You naughty boys! (August 2007)
The University of Sydney is unamused at an attempt earlier this month
by students from its arch rival, the University of NSW, to poison the
UNSW initials into Sydney's beloved quadrangle lawn.
Three male
students were caught in the act by security guards late one Wednesday
evening; one was apprehended and two got away. They subsequently wrote
to the university confessing to their part in what they called a UNSW
Foundation Day prank. The matter has been referred to police and it is
understood that charges of malicious damage have been laid. Meanwhile, the
university estimates lawn repairs to cost about $4000.
Snitch hears
it's not the first time such a thing has happened, and that UNSW lawns
may have suffered indignities perpetrated by Sydney pranksters.
Sorry, you can't study that subject any more (August 2007)
The University of Melbourne has decided to reduce the number of subjects taught by its Faculty of Arts.
Among the 254 subjects to be cancelled and the 227 to be suspended next
year were a few intriguing choices. The mind boggles at the potential
for interesting take-home assignments in Sexing the Self (which explored the "construction of gender and sex" in a variety of societies).
Other intriguing and soon-to-be lamented subjects included German
Humour and The Athlete's Body as Sign and Text.
Among the 108 subjects
replacing those dumped is Extreme Poetry. Bungee jumping with books, or
iambic pentathlons, perhaps?
We don't call 'em universities any more (August 2007)
The word university has officially disappeared from the Government's
lexicon. It has been replaced by HEP or, for those outside the trade,
higher education provider.
The truth was revealed at a workshop in
Canberra last week for the research quality framework. A DEST officer
reinforced the new term in a PowerPoint presentation riddled with HEPs. We no longer call them universities; they are higher education
providers, she pronounced.
With the proliferation of institutions
offering degrees, it probably makes sense to lump them all into one HEaP.
Virtual education goes to the next level (June 2007)
Harvard University now offers virtual Law lectures, delivered in virtual lecture theatres located in virtual world Second Life.
Here in Australia, RMIT University now offers its students virtual
cafes and virtual nightclubs. To find out more, click here or visit virtual Harvard.
Dear Professor, I need at least a B grade (May 2007)
There's an email doing the rounds of the North American academic blogosphere
that, if it's not apocryphal, would deeply trouble those who have noticed a
feckless, self-absorbed tendency in Australia's student body.
An appalled
academic received the email from a student, stripped it of all identifying
marks, and posted it online:
"I was in your British Literature class in the fall
of 2006," says the unnamed student's email. "For that class, you gave me a grade
of C. I need to have a better grade for this class. As far as I know, I got an
86 on the first paper, and I didn't complete the second assignment. I don't know
what I got on the final essay or exam. I would like for you to change my grade
to at least a B. If this means I must complete the second assignment, I will
attempt to set aside time to do so. Please address this matter immediately."
The lowdown on online study (May 2007)
And you thought the big story at Macquarie University was the fate of hundreds
of thousands of dollars in student funds? Nope - it's the treacherous nature of
iLecture, the digital streaming service much patronised by students who sleep
in.
"iLecture is a dangerous beast," says MaryJane, posting as a fourth-year
student in an online debate about hot lecturers at Macquarie. "[iLecture] makes
you think someone is sexy as hell, only to be let down when you Google their
name or actually attend a lecture. It has broken my heart many times."
High-flying Chancellor (May 2007)
Alan Finkel, Monash Uni's new Chancellor, is boldly going where no Chancellor has gone before. He's
one of the few Australians to pony up the $267,000 for Richard Branson's Virgin
Galactic space flight.
A Monash graduate, electrical engineer and
neuroscientist, Finkel put together a successful biotech company, Axon
Instruments, which was recently sold to US interests. A popular science enthusiast, he
stands behind the science magazine Cosmos.
Cultural theory raids the fridge (April 2007)
Perusing the latest Journal of Consumer Culture (as you do!), Snitch came across
an illuminating piece of research by a couple of Canadian and British
researchers, respectively named Hand and Shove.
Condensing Practices: Ways of
Living with a Freezer, by Martin Hand of Queens University and Elizabeth Shove
of Lancaster, suggests the act of shoving your hand in the freezer means much
more than you probably realise. Interviews with "representatives of 40
households" provide "new insight into the ways in which discursive material and
temporal aspects of daily life condense around the freezer. We show how
different ways of living with a freezer are negotiated and maintained ... We
suggest that concepts like those of 'domestication' and 'normalisation' fail to
capture the persistently dynamic status of material objects in daily life, or
their constitutive role in systems of social order. In response, we argue for an
analysis of 'normalisation' as an ongoing achievement, and for an interpretation
of freezing as a surprisingly performative process involving the active
integration of materials, ideologies and skills."
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