keirharper-thorpe.bsky.social
Deputy Director of Curriculum & Progression, at Study Group's ABERDEEN International Study Centre. Educational Developer, Manager, Author. Any views expressed are my PERSONAL ones rather than those of any institution I am associated with.
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Or Charles III given how he has been, to some degree, backing up Canada in this current situation.
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In one classic example I know well, the union rep saying there was 'an elephant in the room', i.e. the workplace management culture not being discussed, was noted as the employee (not the rep) calling their manager an elephant.
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meeting and often writing a record which bears little or no relation to what was actually discussed. They will resent you making your own record or own recording, but it is essential to do so.
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This is one thing so many employers push against. The minute you bring in a union rep, they go 'why are you making this political?' They portray HR staff as somehow neutral, but except for at one place in my 31-year career, they have simply weighed in on the side of the employer, imbalancing the
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Have you seen the movie 'Dodgeball' (2004)? It largely works along this point. The 'underdog' gym that wins through is called 'Average Joe's'
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Unless you attribute. A lot of focus on plagiarism these days is copying text verbatim, but I do remind students they need to attribute ideas too, even if expressed in very different words or even languages.
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take for granted. I am often surprised that students do not recognise that expectation which will be common among many family members and instead often openly profess a happiness to simply go through the ritual for their desired prize.
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engineer, the software specialist, etc. to know and be able to do more than simply enact some kind of 'dance' to get a certificate. It is unsurprising if sectors of society beyond education get anxious that they cannot rely on the bits of paper to tell a truth which for a large part they need to
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interesting to speak with people outside (higher) education who are alarmed if they feel that students have simply gone through the motions of learning and have not genuinely learnt what they studied. Naturally it leads to concerns about how far they can trust the doctor, the nurse, the lawyer, the
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in universities has long, but increasingly, been seen and portrayed as a process, almost a ritual, to gain a certain outcome, seeing the piece of paper and the degree name as the 'prize' of going through it, rather than the intangibles that are what are required for life and for jobs. It is always
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it is about exercising the intellect, just as running around one park will actually help you run around other parks, if we want to put it in those terms. I agree with other commentators that there is an anti-intellectualism at work but I think there is another facet at work, that education
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and you then give me the grade and ultimately the award I am seeking'. Whereas this is the superficial picture and students seem to miss the fact that learning must go so much deeper to be genuine. In addition, completing one essay provides more than simply knowledge about that particular question
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As a former history academic and then going on to deal with academic misconduct across many subjects, I agree with this. It was often something difficult to get across to students who had copied or bought essays. I accept that assessment can look like a transaction: 'I give you the answers you want
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They are great, though, if you are writing fiction and wanting a food for the characters to eat which fits a certain time and place.
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It is also a dictatorial approach, asserting that a particular view of knowledge and learning *must* be universal. In contrast, while always educators encourage engagement, they retain a recognition that some people simply cannot or will not engage with a certain topic or resource or approach.
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I had had mine already so my son brought me a collection of poems by Tu Fu instead. Very thoughtful gift.
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I used to see this regularly on the western reaches of the District Line in the mid/late 1990s.
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more carefully. We were advised we were not permitted to harm foxes that were attacking our coops even if they were killing chickens, so had to find a range of non-harming (let alone non-lethal) deterrents. One mother-and-son fox combination were particularly clever, tenacious and vicious.
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the easier to access fried chicken or kebab lamb meat or even pizza, abandoned by students who lived in the neighbourhood. It was a lot harder for them to break into the coops than scavenge bins and it was apparent local residents either did not abandon so much food as the students or disposed of it
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Off at a tangent, but further illustrating how alert wild animals are to human patterns. We used to live near Bournemouth University and kept chickens. You could know the day the students left for vacation precisely when foxes would begin to attack the chicken coops. Up until then I assume they got
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effectively trying to make the rural space not a throwback to previous decades, but to turn it into a food/raw material factory.
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with the active removal of migrant labour, also back on to working on farms. Such contradictions between the need for industrial cities and yet an emphasis on romanticised rural spaces can be seen under Hitler and Mao, as well, to a degree under Mussolini. Perhaps Stalin took a different route in
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and the cities that accompany it, to provide the machinery and especially the weaponry to allow sustenance of the regime. Thus, while the cities are under attack from the current US administration, we also see this emphasis on getting workers back into 'proper' manufacturing jobs and by implication
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the countryside is associated with 'purity' and indeed with eugenic breeding practices. There is a sentimentality/nostalgia for a supposed golden rural age which utterly neglects the misery of much (pre-)modern rural living. It is always a contradiction, because these regimes also need the industry
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I know it is tiresome, but we can also see parallels to far-right policies of the past, notably the 'blood and soil' attitude of the early/mid-20th Century. Cities have long been portrayed as dangerously cosmopolitan and the home of undesirable whether in terms of race, religion or class. Somehow
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Your book has been beside me for so much of my career and it keeps marching on. 💪
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In addition there is really only one country in the world where *school shootings* have become 'routine'. I know it gets larger than its global population share in terms of world news coverage, but even so, the exceptionality of some of these tendencies needs to be marked out.
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It is one perspective, though far from controversial, did attract a lot of attention back in 1996. I did not accept all Goldhagen's arguments, but that element, to me, appeared correct.
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I must apologise. It is a ND trait. Especially in a medium without much 'tone', I will often take jokes as serious comments and then they rather release my 'tsunami' which I have come to see what was what got me into writing and education in the first place.
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To look inwards at your fellow passengers and study them. I used to ride the London Underground for 2 hours every weekday.
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Perhaps it's worse than this. I would be happy if there were 'phone' carriages in trains or segregated seats in cinemas for their use, the way there used to be smoking areas, but they are now more ubiquitous in public than cigarettes ever were, with perhaps the underground being a partial exception.
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in that area before and had carried out an unacceptable regime. How historic must something be or how relatively minor can it be, before the tourist is excused from paying such respect? Does it have to be eternal? Can we/should we ever holiday in a way oblivious to what we are holidaying on top of?
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woman I met in Munich in the 1980s who argued that no-one should ever holiday in that city without visiting the Dachau camp, each time they came. Now the regime that had run Dachau was over, but for her, there was a sense that not to pay respect on every visit was to be forgiving those who had lived
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There is a whole realm of discussion about what obligations one has a tourist. Is it really acceptable simply to go to a country and not be aware of the political context? Does that make the tourist complicit, beyond even the money they are effectively providing to that regime? It reminds me of a
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itself, but we could say it would have differed. Perhaps the more likely outcome would have been German woman labour *and* slave labour, being used.
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form of torture for Jewish prisoners. Thus, we could argue that if the Nazi regime had used women from Germany in place of slave labour it would have differed in a crucial way from what we see historically as 'being' Nazi. Trying to determine the relativity of tyranny is potentially corrupting in
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All of this overlooks the fact that the use of slave labour of itself was a tenet of Nazism rather than actually being associated with raising production. Indeed Goldhagen makes a convincing case that in particular the use of Jewish 'labour' had nothing to do with output and was simply an additional
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felt obliged to feed and house its own nationals in a way that it felt no obligation at all to do for slave labour and even to a poor degree from conscripted male labour from occupied countries. Thus, it would have cost more for the state, but output is likely to have been higher.
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It is an interesting counter-factual. Would Germany have been able to fight on longer in the Second World War if it had conscripted women labour rather than used slave labour? I imagine German woman labour would have been more efficient as some would have been volunteers. In addition, the Nazi state
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I accept that. It is very mechanical. However, it worries me because those who do not hold to such extreme positions still might pick up 'residue' which accretes and thus their perception of atheists deteriorates. I guess that would be what the propagandists are actually seeking.
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Reminds me of my childhood. We had friends and neighbours who holidayed in Spain while Franco was still alive and we would get a history/politics lesson when we asked why we did not go there on holiday too.
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that often we ask students who rarely use a pen, still to write with one for some hours. The problems of AI and blocking accessing illicit resources on laptops weighs in to necessitate traditional writing which is no longer common practice for most people.
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modes are able to weather the AI situation better than others which have not or, as you note, cannot. Beyond that there is the question of whether students working in an AI-aided context through the term can mentally make a switch to writing without it. This comes on top of the long-time challenge
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Yes. I am intrigued by the 'allowed to go back' as certainly the institutions I know, this is already a done deal and, apart from peeling signs, you might otherwise never know Covid ever shook things up. The next question then is whether those universities who have already reverted to traditional
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I never forgave him for dragging the entire family to see '2001: A Space Odyssey' and refused to see any movies with him ever again.
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As for movies, his and my tastes were far too far apart. I introduced him to 'Blade Runner' (1982) on video cassette, but he complained because all through it I kept on pointing out where it differed from the novel. Perhaps the only recommendation of his I liked was 'Jason and the Argonauts' (1963).
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Working for the BBC he did get discounted books linked to 'Jackanory' and I did enjoy the Littlenose and Arabel's Raven books from that series and it got me into Norse myths.
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encountered chunks of it in carol concerts at middle school.
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I really disliked the books he introduced me to and developed a loathing of John Updike. Fortunately he gave up after that attempt. Perhaps the only book I liked that he introduced me to was 'Pavane' (1968) by Keith Roberts and 'Cider with Rosie' (1959) by Laurie Lee was not bad, but I had already
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innovations in assessment in this century become embedded? Just because students are back in exam rooms does not mean they have to be doing what people of their (grand)parents' generations did in them.