Tag: academia
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Edumageddon
So I read that Ernst & Young has released a report on the future of universities, saying bluntly that “Over the next 10-15 years, the current public university model in Australia will prove unviable in all but a few cases”. With all due respect, bollocks. E&Y’s document (embedded at the bottom of the ABC article)…
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Failing: a taxonomy of techniques
Not having posted anything for a while, it must be time for another excursion into the minds of the next generation of professionals and experts. Having spent the last month marking assignments, tests and exams, I present to you the following valuable categorisation of failure: The Rainman: The student furnishes you with one or more…
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The land of marking
Those less fortunate among us are, on occasion, forcibly sent to a distant (and somewhat two-dimensional) realm of existence to undertake grueling mental labour: the marking of student submissions. I have mapped this land from what little remains of my mind after many hours crossing its ragged terrain, with naught but a red pen and…
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One brand to fool them all
As you might have realised, I work at Curtin University, [intlink id=”16″ type=”post”]formerly[/intlink] Curtin University of Technology (CUT), formerly – though conceivably somewhat apocryphally – Curtin University of New Technology (CU*T), formerly the Western Australian Institute of Technology (WAIT), formerly Perth Technical College, formerly Perth Technical School, formerly – and definitely more apocryphally – the New…
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Fire drill
I do respect fire drills. Honestly, I do. However, when the alarm started sounding at around 11:30 this morning I happened to be naked, wet and soapy, as a result (fortunately) of being in the shower. I was fairly certain it was a drill because I’d seen another drill earlier in the morning for the…
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The colloquium
An “official communication” from early June demanded that all Engineering and Computing postgraduate students take part in the Curtin Engineering & Computing Research Colloquium. Those who didn’t might be placed on “conditional status”, the message warned. A slightly rebellious instinct led me to think of ways to obey the letter but not the spirit of…
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From a campus
I found this somewhat random piece of work (sung to the tune of Bette Midler’s From A Distance) while digging through my hard drive. I did have to change “John” to “Rudd” though. From a distance the campus looks green and orange, and the concrete buildings grey. From a distance OASIS meets the screen, and…
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Unstimulated
The ATO’s tax bonus eligibility calculator informs me that I’m not, after all, eligible to receive the $900 tax bonus. I was above the tax-free threshold in 2007-08, but my tax was erased by offsets. It’s not clear whether I’m eligible to receive the $950 “training and learning” bonus either. I’m unknown to Centrelink and…
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Students
Here’s what diversity means to a university tutor. Student A appears with a deer-in-the-headlights look at the door to the senior tutor room and asks (in a bewildering tone that sounds as if a layer of righteous outrage has been suppressed and petrified beneath another layer of sheer blinding terror) if there is going to…
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The university of technology
All Curtin students and staff know about OASIS. OASIS purportedly stands for “Online Access to Student Information Service” . Is that the best they could do, you ask? Evidentially, that full name is now such an embarrassment that it doesn’t seem to appear anywhere on the official OASIS website. However, I’m still not sure which…