All my students now were born after 9/11. I tell them I’m a being from another century. And I often feel that in my bones. I look around and am baffled by the world we have built. #academia#academicchatter
1 hour after submitting grades, LMS notification of student message. Bracing for grade complaint, procrastinated opening app and spent intervening day grumbling about youth of today. Buckled down + opened messages, to discover that student wrote to say what she loved about the course and learnt from fellow students. Friends, I am crying. #AcademicChatter
It's a very odd feeling, having played a role in Web 1, 2, & 3, to be mentoring students who only know of those moments via third-party scholarship.
Much of that scholarship is very good. But it's all coalesced around received wisdom & fixed narratives, and those tend to leave out a lot of important details.
I'm always torn about whether and how much to use my own memory/experience of the events to add nuance, or to just let the official story be the official story.
“Sorry, I couldn’t do the reviews nor submit that abstract. We had to hack a replacement for shitty #Sonos app for there’s no way we can do any scholarly work without appropriate music and nap timers”
Hey, has anyone here had experience examining a PhD thesis “by publication”? I’m doing an admin task around revisions to a thesis (in Australia we don’t have a thesis defence), and the student/supervisor team have dismissed any comments on chapters which were already published (there were many comments from 3 examiners). Is this common practice? #academicchatter#phd
Work: We really value grad student opinions in our new director search. Would you like to serve on the director search committee? It'll be about 60 hours of work during the fall semester.
Me: Cool. Is there funding to cover the students' time?
Work: ....
Work: This is a service position
In a donor list to an early 17thc convent, all the men (so far, only men!) are named & their titles given, & then the thing that they paid for is listed. One didn't just give money to the project; donors want their name on this window, that door, this meaningful space within the edifice.
And in my monastic chronicle, men evidently pay for things, while women pay more often for prayers and services. (This is ca. 1606-7)
Not entirely, of course: one of the women pays for a window, and two others for specific door-latches. ("I scrimped and saved and paid for this lock and key, look at me!")
Also, you could be a servant and still help fund the monastery.
#academic#academicchatter
Do you also have colleagues who, when meeting external visitors, tell that "the real research" is done in their institute, and not in the neighbouring one (which happens to be yours)?
Or are you luckier, and your colleague are less pathetic and less affected by egomaniac problems...?
I wonder if it is even ethical to enlist affiliation to the university if my funding comes directly from a funding institute, I'm buying and using my own hardware and software (down to the HDMI cable and mouse), and the data is also coming directly from another organization. The coffee and food is also off my own pocket.
The only things they provide are electricity (computer, coffee), water (coffee), and internet.
"Details about oil majors contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to top universities to build relationships that could help the industry avoid taking climate action were inside thousands of pages of documents unveiled Tuesday by Democrats on the House Oversight and Accountability and the Senate Budget committees.
Of the files released Tuesday, many show the extraordinary lengths energy giants have gone to in order to maintain public support for the oil industry — a major employer that’s also one of the nation’s top corporate climate polluters.
Companies have acknowledged, then flat-out ignored, stark warnings about the fate of the planet in relation to their activities."
If you, or journals you work with, are publishing in multiple languages in #OpenJournalSystems (OJS), or are interested in learning more, we hope you can join us!
The president of #Barnard College lost a faculty-wide vote of no confidence on Tuesday, as criticism mounts over the school’s response to a pro- #Palestine 🇵🇸 encampment
It is the first no confidence vote against a president in the college’s history.
Someone needs to write a science-fiction story about a future scenario in which the AI entities running the world will force humans to write their papers and reports for them. (Inspired by a modified version of a famous Isaac Asimov story.)
Suppose you were a funder wanting to design a system to fund science projects that were bottom up rather than top down. How would you do it?
I think you'd want to restrict it to non-faculty to start with, and have some sort of consensus-building rather than competitive approach. Like, maybe you could have an initial round where people proposed ideas, followed by a second round where people indicated who they'd be willing to work with and which aspects of their ideas they'd be willing to drop or modify in order to build consensus. Possibly you might need multiple rounds like this until you iterated on a solution that worked.
Would there by problematic hidden power dynamics in an approach like that? I guess so, there always are. But maybe still better than top down approach?
And is there any chance of finding a funder who would be willing to experiment with such an idea? Or any existing examples of experiments like that? Or more generally, examples of funders taking a non-competitive approach?
Timely reminder that disabilities are fluid. A person may be symptomatic one day and fine the next. A student may not need accommodations during the semester, but the end of the term rush may make accommodations very necessary. This does NOT mean the student is faking it or taking advantage of you.
Currently keeping me aural company while I work (I woke up, couldn't go back to sleep and decided to dive back into the blasted article), Noveller's Fantastic Planet (2015)
'We focus on metrics to evaluate a scientist’s career: how many articles they have published, how many times they were cited, what was the impact factor of all these articles. '