Silliness in Irish universities?

My goodness, a symposium organised by the Royal Irish Academy recently on the standing of academics in the public sphere seems to have turned into a right old whinge-fest. A report on the event and the contributions made was carried in the Irish Times, and as far as I can tell every one of them [...]

Home study?

The Irish Independent reported on Saturday that a majority of students are choosing a university or college in their vicinity. University College Cork, Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin all have well over 60 per cent of their students coming from their own city or county or those immediately adjacent; they are, perhaps oddly, [...]

Utilitarian toy hamsters

I’m trying to get my head around this one. According to an Irish Times report, shoppers availing of the post-Thanksgiving shopping sales in the United States have, as the report puts it, maintained a ‘utilitarian focus that has replaced bubble-era excess since last September’s Wall Street crash.’ That’s good to know. And what, therefore, are [...]

68 lives on

Yesterday (November 27) was the birth date of two persons who, in different ways, were icons of my teenage years and who defined a lot of 1968 for me. But, as I said, they were very different: the first was Alexander Dubcek, the second Jimi Hendrix. Dubcek was a Czech politician, a Communist activist during [...]

Class twittering

For those who have wondered – as I have – whether the ‘micro-blog’ site Twitter could be used successfully in teaching, here’s a story that suggests that it could be. According to a report in the US Chronicle of Higher Education, Purdue University in Indiana has set up a program that allows student to ask [...]

Day of shame

Once again Ireland is in the global news headlines, and the story is one of abuse, betrayal and shame. Thursday saw the publication of the Report by the Commission of Investigation into the handling by Church and State authorities of allegations and suspicions of child abuse against clerics of the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin. Although as we [...]

What do you want from education?

Recently I was chatting to a group of intelligent, well-educated and well-meaning people, all of whom have one or more children in secondary schools in Dublin. What, I asked them, are you hoping that these schools will deliver for your children. The optimist in me was hoping for answers around pedagogy, civilised values, knowledge development, [...]

Free and easy on Twitter? Think again!

Long time (or should that be long-suffering) readers of this blog will know that I have a Twitter account, which I use every so often to say where I am or what I am thinking or contemplating. I have to admit I spend very little time wondering whether someone might be upset at what I [...]

Universities: the industry dimension

Some time ago I came across a website (I no longer recall the details) which was running what I thought was a particularly silly survey: it was asking its readers to ‘vote’ in an online poll whether universities should be more like corporations. It was silly in the sense that at that level of generality [...]

Action days

Today, as certainly all Irish readers of this blog will know, has been a day of strike action organised by Irish public service trade unions in protest at cuts in funding for public services, expected salary reductions and reductions in staffing. As a result more or less all of Ireland’s public and civil service offices [...]