My comrade in another country, Jason Wilson, has a rousing Guardian column critiquing the middle-class progressive view that credentialised expertise — in the form of political ‘wonks’ — shall save us (and follow up Tumblr post clarifying comments about Piketty’s celebrity wonk book). Jason’s thesis is that politics is inherently antagonistic. The consensus-driven post-war prosperity was an anomaly […]
Monthly Archives: June 2014
Education and Cluster Funded Explanations
The way fields of knowledge are split into teaching and research clusters in higher education in Australia is confusing . We have Field of Research codes through which we align our research outputs with disciplinary groupings and we have Field of Education codes through which the government analyses student numbers, teaching performances and funding. They don’t always […]
Vox the News Cycle
Interesting discussion at Nieman Journalism Lab triggered by a recent post by Vox Media’s VP of Engineering, Michael Lovitt, on launching Vox.xom as a nine week development project. Vox.com has some very cool features, not least of which is the threading of topically related stories into ‘StoryStreams’, including the stream of “How We Make Vox“. Co-founder of Vox, […]
Building Research Capacity
Ben Eltham‘s analysis of the cuts to investment in science and research also touches on some general points about building research capacity in the contemporary era of underfunded research institutions. The main point that needs to be emphasised is the lack of stability that the current de-funding approach produces. Eltham quotes Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt on the difficulties of […]
Journalism Jobs
The ABC is reporting on a leaked “issues paper” from the University of Queensland (UQ) and that UQ apparently plan to merge most of their Communications offerings. Part of this process is allegedly dropping the journalism course (although the leaked document states the contrary: they have no intention to drop the BJournalism degree). “Issue paper” author and UQ […]