The Newcastle drama

I suspect that not that many readers of this blog are very interested in Newcastle United FC, but then again I haven’t written about the club for a while. And today we have some fairly dramatic news. According to the BBC and Sky Sports, the club has appointed football legend and record Newcastle goal scorer  Alan Shearer [...]

Does the lecture have a future?

About a year ago a research group involving four Australian universities published a report entitled The Impact of Web-Based Lecture Technologies on Current and Future Practices in Learning and Teaching. One of the key findings of this report was that students on the whole were enthusiastic about web-based lectures – i.e. lectures delivered in the traditional way but [...]

The purpose of higher education reform

Over recent months a significant number of commentators – in the media, in politics, from industry and elsewhere – have suggested that major reform in Irish higher education is needed. Furthermore, the Minister for Education and Science has, as we know, established a strategic review process for higher education. Most of the discussion that this [...]

The road back to an exporting economy

The trajectory that led us to the particular circumstances we are now experiencing was becoming evident to some observers by the middle of this decade. It is interesting to quote what was said in the 2006 Annual Report of Ireland’s National Competitiveness Council: ‘While the economy has continued to grow strongly in the first half of this decade, [...]

Day trip to Dublin

The first diary I ever kept was in 1966. And on March 27 that year (exactly 42 years ago today), I joined my mother on a trip to Dublin, from our home in County Westmeath. And in the diary I noted: “1 hour 45 minutes each way. Car parked by man outside Hibernian Hotel. Switzers [...]

College disasters and their causes

By now we have become accustomed to the parade of disaster stories from financial institutions, and on the whole we now know how they got themselves – and us – into the major messes we have witnessed. But now the question is occasionally being asked whether higher education institutions will also start to hit the [...]

University accountability – here we go again

According to a report in the Irish Independent newspaper, the Minister for Education and Science Mr Batt O’Keeffe TD, in addressing the Higher Education authority, declared that universities needed to demonstrate ‘greater value and accountability for money’. He went on to muse that the universities’ institutional autonomy had been beneficial at one level but had also raised concerns about value [...]

Humility and pessimism

It’s been a day for bad attitudes. Two reports in the media this morning: one told us that German politicians feel that Ireland needs to show ‘humility’, and the other confirmed that Ireland was right now the most pessimistic nation – well, almost anywhere. Germany, apparently, wants to use the current crisis to raise its influence [...]

Ireland’s welcome

Last week the Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister), Brian Cowen, announced that Ireland was willing to resettle a ‘small number’ of released prisoners from the US detention centre in Guantanamo Bay. This immediately drew a warm welcome from both the Obama administration and from Amnesty International. And it should be seen as confirmation that Ireland continues [...]

Hang on a minute!

Concerned that traditional teaching methods may be outdated? Wondering how we can keep students interested in our programmes? And are you reaching for the TV remote control right now as you start to lose interest in this post? Hang on a minute. Literally. We have the answer: the ‘microlecture’. This is a ‘tiny burst of [...]