2010 | University of Venus

Archive for 2010|Yearly archive page

Where Do You Hide?

In Conversations on 2010/12/24 at 00:22

A couple of weeks ago, Lee pitched an idea for bringing several of us at UVenus together around a single question and Meg and I thought it would be a great way to end 2010 as we take a break for the holidays in the USA. We’d like to make this a monthly feature at University of Venus and we want our readers to participate! If you tweet your answer, one of us will post it on the blog for you.

Lee: I love how University of Venus brings voices from across academia and around the world, but I had always wished there was a way to bring our voices together in a more informal discussion about, well, whatever. The catalyst for me was reading Bitch Media’s Grand Rounds blogger discussion about TV’s Grey’s Anatomy. The discussion was insightful, funny, and it felt like people I would want to talk to about my (guilty) pleasure. This, I thought, would be a perfect format for us at UVenus. I feel like I am a part of a family at the University of Venus. I think it’s about time we get to know each other a little better and geek out and share that with the rest of our readers.

Where do you hide on your campus when you need to get work done?

Lee: I hide in my office. It’s in a converted house just on the edge of campus and doesn’t appear on any campus maps. My students can’t find me, and the way the house has been partitioned, there is nowhere for the professors and instructors to congregate, thus we just huddle up in our offices. It even has a (fake) fireplace.

Denise: I’d like to say I have a place to hide on campus, but I really don’t. The student center coffee shop? “Oh hi professor Horn! Can I talk to you while you try to eat that really messy sandwich?” The library? “Oh Professor Horn! I was just researching that paper–are you busy?” My office? “Hey Professor Horn, I know your door is closed, but do you have a minute for 12 of us?” So….yeah. I hide at home.

Afshan: The only place where I actually get anything done is at home—after the kids go to sleep! If I do work on campus, it’s limited to grading or preparing for class, and I do that in my office. ALL my other work happens at home . . . often in the wee hours of the night.

Deanna: I don’t! Since I spend all day “working” on campus, I tend to do my “scholarly” work at home. Or I come in to my office on weekends in my socks and pj’s and get twice as much done in half the time!

Meg: Recently, I have been working on drawing boundaries as part of my professional development. My favorite hiding spot is in my office, door closed, with a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door. I have everything I need in my homey office.

Elizabeth: Despite Northwestern’s notoriously poor relationship with Evanston, the university and the city create a fairly seamless community. As a result, I can’t hide. Somebody finds me. Always. My husband calls it a small English village of 80,000. To make escape even less possible, I grew up here. If I don’t run into someone from work, neighborhood or both, I will run into a friend of my parents. In truth, I love it and wouldn’t change a thing.

Rosalie: Nowhere. If it’s reading or writing an article/book, I can’t do do this in our campus. We have a common faculty room where silence is impossible. The library’s serials section is the only air-conditioned room with the desired quietude, but the library being a hill away, it’s not worth the trouble hiking across searing heat or a downpour.

Mary: I like to hide in plain sight. Campuses are often unofficially divided into distinct faculty/student and administrative areas. As an administrator on a wireless campus, I can get a lot of work done in a comfortable chair in the corner of a student lounge. When I do run into other administrators, they are usually co-conspirators and they nod or give me a wink and move on.

Itır: I also do not, cannot hide on campus. Actually I am generally so busy that there is no time to hide. When I need the quality time on my own to do work at most is when I need to grade and when I need to write a paper. For both I need uninterrupted time which is a luxury to get on campus. So I also hide off-campus.

Anamaria: The offices at my various workplaces (I have a total of three) are spaces for interaction with my colleagues and students. The space for creative work, like writing, is my retreat at home. I have the luxury of a room of my own where I can just close the door and separate myself from the world. Sometimes I like to have another silent working person in the same room though, it works like a preventive means against procrastination, he he! I wish I could work in cafés, but I cannot concentrate (not even on reading, even less on writing)…

Heather: I currently work in an open area, near the main entrance to the building, so I greet a lot of foot traffic and visitors asking directions. When I need to focus, or when I need to hide out, I go to the dining hall. It is spacious, bright, and looks out onto the courtyard with beautiful stained glass windows. Between meals, the hum of students working and talking provides a cafe-like atmosphere.

Ana: I live in Berlin and my institution is in Romania. I am always hidden and have to work to make myself seen. I do this mostly by writing. I can send an article or a review or make a comment online. Sometimes, I make myself seen by attending a conference.

Happy Holidays from the writers at University of Venus!

Let us know, where do you hide to get work done?

▶ Comment

change, Faculty, Teaching

What is a Course in Higher Ed?

In Uncategorized on 2010/12/23 at 10:40

Lee Skallerup Bessette, writing from Kentucky in the USA

My 200-level students last semester proposed or redesigned a university-level course for their final assignment.* They were allowed to make it in any subject, at any level. It wasn’t my most tightly conceived assignment, so I wasn’t sure what to expect from them. The results were understandably uneven, but revealed a great deal about what undergraduates think an undergraduate degree should be.

First, the good news. There were general education courses proposed in strategic thinking, debating, the history of rock and roll, and biology (which included the important component of making it relevant). There were highly specialized courses in local micro-sociology, service learning for veterinary tech, sports sociology, diversity issues in education, and even a design class for business students. These students showed real creativity and practicality when proposing the courses, looking at what students could and should learn to most benefit their educations. These courses were about getting students to think and do differently. These were, unsurprisingly, in the minority.

Read the rest at Inside Higher Ed (link here)

*****

We launched the University of Venus blog in February 2010 and currently have readers from over 125 countries. In October, 2010 the blog was visited by over 26,000 readers.

In July 2010 we partnered with Inside Higher Ed (a large higher ed media publication in the US) as part of a new initiative to support blogs focused on international and global higher ed.

In June, GlobalHigherEd and The World View launched with IHE. GlobalHigherEd is headed up by Kris Olds (professor at UWisconsin-Madison) and Susan Robertson (professor at UBristol, UK). The World View is a blogging venture coming from Philip Altbach’s team at the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College.

Beginning July 12, we started blogging at University of Venus @ Inside Higher Ed. Check out our new home and join the conversation (link here)

▶ Comment

change, culture, GenX

I Need a Work Husband

In Information Minoration on 2010/12/21 at 02:21

Heather Alderfer, writing from New Haven, Connecticut in the USA.

I’ve had some great work husbands in my relatively short career, but they can be hard to find. I’m lucky to have a partner who also loves what he does, but when we come home at the end of the day, our work stories are like oil and water. I’d love to regale him with stories of the report I can’t get quite right because of a pesky outer join, but I’m afraid he’d be asleep before I even explained the project. The GQ author gets this: “Telling your real wife that story, or explaining why so much annoyance is embedded in a tiny moment in a meeting, requires such a tremendous amount of back story and preamble and small-beans exposition, it’s futile.”

Work spouses are quick with snarky blackberry comments during meetings, and share inside jokes about failed projects or those quirky, but entertaining, students or faculty. One work husband escaped his office on the excuse my floor had the better tea selection, but those tea breaks allowed us to re-hash a meeting from earlier in the day and share insights we were not comfortable sharing around the conference table with a wider audience.

Read the rest at Inside Higher Ed (link here)

*****

We launched the University of Venus blog in February 2010 and currently have readers from over 125 countries. In October, 2010 the blog was visited by over 26,000 readers.

In July 2010 we partnered with Inside Higher Ed (a large higher ed media publication in the US) as part of a new initiative to support blogs focused on international and global higher ed.

Beginning July 12, we started blogging at University of Venus @ Inside Higher Ed. Check out our new home and join the conversation (link here)

▶ Comment

Research, Risk-Taking, Students

Research and Awe

In Graduate Studies & Students on 2010/12/17 at 22:56

Deanna England, writing from Winnipeg, Manitoba in Canada.

This past month I completed my second Master’s course – a Research Methods class which took us through the paces of literature reviews, conference proposals, peer reviews, paper drafts and concluded with a small class symposium where we each presented our work. I confess, it sounded dry to me when I registered. I was almost dreading it as it all seemed to be so much of what I was already advising my students on. However, I was determined to be positive, so I chose to use it as an exercise to improve my writing. And of course, it was wonderful.

As Graduate Studies Officer, one of my responsibilities is reviewing scholarship applications. One of the amazing things about life is that you just never know when you’re suddenly going to be struck with something unexpectedly fantastic. I had had a fatalistic view of working on scholarships – I was panicked that I would miss some inane detail that would cause my students to miss out on funding due to my inadequacy. It seemed like a mountain of work with a never-ending ocean of minutiae. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Read the rest at Inside Higher Ed (link here)

*****

We launched the University of Venus blog in February 2010 and currently have readers from over 125 countries. In October, 2010 the blog was visited by over 26,000 readers.

In July 2010 we partnered with Inside Higher Ed (a large higher ed media publication in the US) as part of a new initiative to support blogs focused on international and global higher ed.

Beginning July 12, we started blogging at University of Venus @ Inside Higher Ed. Check out our new home and join the conversation (link here)

▶ Comment

change, GenX, Teaching

Do You Want Fries with That Degree?

In Uncategorized on 2010/12/15 at 23:13

Afshan Jafar, writing from Connecticut in the USA

It happens every time. I start teaching the concepts of McDonaldization and mass production to my students and it sends me into a mini-crisis. I keep thinking of the video for “Another Brick in the Wall” by Pink Floyd. It’s the one where students are being manufactured on an assembly line: face-less, and almost mechanical.

There seem to be at least four forces which rationalize and ease the move toward mass production in higher education.

1. The institutions: With financial uncertainty and the increased dependence on tuition for an institution’s well-being, admitting greater numbers of students is a more attractive option. As enrollments increase, at the same time that institutions are unable and/or unwilling to hire more faculty, our class sizes increase.

2. Textbooks and their publishers: Test banks, lecture outlines, power point presentations, video clips—you name it, they have it all figured out for us! Why start from scratch? We can save a lot of browsing through colleagues’ syllabi, and reading the latest research in the field, by using instead one of these pre-packaged bundles of knowledge. When I was a graduate student and thrown into teaching a large class on a topic that I had never taught before, my first and sometimes my last stop was a textbook. This is not to say that you can’t teach a great course using a textbook or that there aren’t times when it is necessary. But textbooks, especially when used in the social sciences or the humanities, standardize knowledge and make students into “efficient” readers—with their boxes, bold print definitions, chapter summaries, keywords—though not necessarily more engaged ones. But if you want your students to struggle and realize that knowledge is complicated and open to interpretation, textbooks may not be the best tool for that kind of instruction.

3. The professors/instructors: With increasing class sizes, we are often forced to make decisions about our courses that have everything to do with efficiency and how best to evaluate large numbers of students, and nothing to do with our pedagogical ideals. We may know the flaws of standardized testing, but when faced with a large class, are weekly journal assignments a feasible option? It is precisely because of these fears of the mass production of education and of students themselves, that I’ve taken (and have been fortunate enough to take) certain steps when designing my courses. I’ve avoided textbooks entirely since leaving graduate school (and I acknowledge that my field and my institution afford me that privilege), I’ve never given multiple choice exams, and there are no page limits on my assignments. Every detail, every stitch, on every one of my courses has been put there by me personally. But this semester I taught two large introductory sections as two of my three classes, and I saw the seams, those stitches that I myself had sewn, starting to come undone. Out went the weekly writing assignments; out went the papers with no page limits.

4. And lastly, the students: Yes, even the students, who really are the ones who lose the most in all this—they pay a lot of money to be in huge classes which require them to buy expensive textbooks—they too play a role in the march towards standardization and the mass production of education. The complacency with which many students have accepted their fates is sometimes astonishing. When was the last time students protested their class sizes or the methods of evaluation employed in large classes? Of course, the fault is not entirely theirs. Their passivity is a reflection of how accustomed they are to being on the assembly line. And it’s a testament to how effective our institutions are in producing docile bodies. But what have we, as teachers, taught them to expect from their education? On the first day of classes this semester, I asked my students to get up from their seats and follow me around the building, single-file, no talking. They did. I meandered down the hallways and then returned to class. Not one student questioned me or asked me why we had just done that. What was the point of the exercise? As I told my students later on, it was to encourage them to reject the assembly line model of higher education, to question, to wonder, to be engaged

I often start off the semester with this exercise and not a single student has ever asked about the purpose of the exercise. It’s no wonder I can’t get that Pink Floyd video out of my mind.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

▶ Comment

Curriculum, Teaching

General Education Examined

In Ponderings of a Peregrine Pinoy Professor on 2010/12/13 at 23:44

Rosalie Arcala Hall, writing from the Philippines.

My sister recently visited a physician in Manila who turned out to be a former undergraduate student of mine in Iloilo. Recognizing the common surname (Arcala), the doctor gushed about how I had tempted her to switch from a Biology major to a Political Science major, upon taking my General Education class in Social, Economic and Political Theory. To this day she remembers Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau and Marx and the engaging manner in which I embedded their ideas in their historical milieus. In my twenty odd years in the academe, it was the best compliment I have ever received (albeit indirectly). It is also a silent vindication of the premise behind General Education courses in my home university.

First introduced in 1959, GE courses comprise 45 units (or 15 courses covering Communications, Mathematics, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, History, Humanities and Philosophy). Whether majoring in fine arts, computer science or marine biology, all students have to take the GE courses as they form the core learning and competencies that are the university’s trademark. One of my GE teachers referred to it as Renaissance education; another touted its usefulness for engaging cocktail conversation.

Read the rest at Inside Higher Ed (link here)

*****

We launched the University of Venus blog in February 2010 and currently have readers from over 125 countries. In October, 2010 the blog was visited by over 26,000 readers.

In July 2010 we partnered with Inside Higher Ed (a large higher ed media publication in the US) as part of a new initiative to support blogs focused on international and global higher ed.

Beginning July 12, we started blogging at University of Venus @ Inside Higher Ed. Check out our new home and join the conversation (link here)

▶ Comment

Grading, Teaching

Grading Student Essays or How to Give Constructive Feedback

In Anamaria's Posts on 2010/12/10 at 22:18

Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, writing from Lund in Sweden

The topic of this blog post comes naturally to me, as I sit surrounded by over 40 essays waiting for me to grade. 40 essays, each 8 pages long – you count how much text I must get through, and fast (as my deadline for delivering the final marks is approaching very soon). The immensity of the task makes me wonder what the purpose of this exercise is and which ways there are to best achieve this goal. And so, I find myself writing about grading.

The recent discussions on this topic on Twitter have been very intensive (just check #grading and you will see what I mean) and have covered very interesting aspects involved in the process of assessing a student’s work: everything from using numbers vs. using letters (as in Prof. Hacker’s entry), to how to deal with cheating, and to calls for a general reform of the grading system in the US (as seen at this conference).

Read the rest at Inside Higher Ed (link here)

*****

We launched the University of Venus blog in February 2010 and currently have readers from over 125 countries. In October, 2010 the blog was visited by over 26,000 readers.

In July 2010 we partnered with Inside Higher Ed (a large higher ed media publication in the US) as part of a new initiative to support blogs focused on international and global higher ed.

Beginning July 12, we started blogging at University of Venus @ Inside Higher Ed. Check out our new home and join the conversation (link here)

▶ Comment

Academia, Faculty, Work

Separation of Home and Office: Home-Offices and Homey Offices

In Under the Rain With No Umbrella on 2010/12/09 at 06:54

Itir Toksöz writing from Istanbul in Turkey

Every morning I wake up, get dressed, put on my make-up, drink a glass of cold milk with no sugar and then I walk to the University. It takes me about 10 minutes. Living in a huge metropolis like Istanbul where most people have to commute for at least an hour or more and change a few public transportation vehicles to get to work, I must say I am blessed by my morning exercise of walking to my office, which is kind of like a second home to me.

The fact that my office is a second home to me is reflected in the way I decorate it. I know that some people like a pure and simple office: a desk on which a computer sits, a chair, shelves full of books and folders and a desk lamp, maybe a few things on the walls and nothing more. I actually do have all of that. I have even been told that it is some people’s preference to keep their office as plain as possible so that they can separate their workplace and their home. Just like they do not like taking work home, they do not like creating an office atmosphere that feels like home.

Read the rest at Inside Higher Ed (link here)

*****

We launched the University of Venus blog in February 2010 and currently have readers from over 125 countries. In October, 2010 the blog was visited by over 26,000 readers.

In July 2010 we partnered with Inside Higher Ed (a large higher ed media publication in the US) as part of a new initiative to support blogs focused on international and global higher ed.

Beginning July 12, we started blogging at University of Venus @ Inside Higher Ed. Check out our new home and join the conversation (link here)

▶ Comment

GenX, Social Media, Writing

Read Me

In Vistas from Venus on 2010/12/07 at 04:22

Meg Palladino, writing from Boston, Massachusetts in the USA

For several years during my early 20’s, I kept a journal that I called the “Read Me Journal.” There are three volumes, all written in floral hardbound notebooks, with the words “Read Me” scrawled across the front in black nail polish. They are all fat and include various newspaper and magazine clippings, drawings and a few dashes of perfume to supplement the handwritten account of my life. Each has a detailed table of contents, written in A.A. Milne style, beginning with the words “In which…” They also include handwritten comments from my friends on whatever I had written.

I wrote in the journal daily, capturing snippets of my life. I left the journal out on the coffee table, in a house where I lived with four roommates, and invited them to read my journal and comment on what I had written, or to even write their own journal entries there for others to read. I brought it with me when I visited other friends, and left it on their coffee tables. Surprisingly, my friends did read the journal, and even wrote their own entries in the journal for me and others to read.

Although I no longer keep a Read Me Journal, the three volumes on my shelf hold the record of a funny, strange time in my life and in the lives of my friends. At the time that I was writing it, I wondered if it would ever become a public memoir.

I tried to be as honest and open as I could in my Read Me Journal. However, as an open diary, there are many things I did not write about: deep insecurities, negative thoughts about my peers, or anything too controversial. I tried to write things that would entertain my friends, teach them more about me, or to get some kind of feedback from them on things I was thinking.

I remember when I first heard the term “blog,” I asked a fried what it meant. She replied, “It’s like your Read Me Journal, but it is online.” There is an entry in my last Read Me Journal titled, “In which Meg considers putting the Read Me Journal online.” I nixed the idea, preferring the physical journal that I could carry with me everywhere and leave on coffee tables. Besides, I reasoned, I couldn’t include scents in an online journal.

The Read Me Journal never made it online, but when I am writing blog posts, I often think about the Read Me Journals. I sometimes struggle to find things to write about that are related to my work in academia, but that won’t get me into difficult situations with my colleagues or institution.

What do you censor when your diary is open?

▶ Comment

Academia, change, UK, Women

The Post-Modern MRS

In Uncategorized on 2010/12/03 at 23:58

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe, writing from Evanston, Illinois in the USA

The benighted “MRS” degree bore a particular meaning for my mother’s generation. Young women went off to college with minimal interest in their major and maximum interest in securing a mate. Their graduation took a distant second to their wedding as evidence that they had successfully concluded their college experience. Think of Elizabeth Taylor in Father of the Bride. The weary wives of Mad Men hold degrees from the vaunted “Seven Sisters:” Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mt. Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley. An embittered divorcée says in season one that she never used her four years of Holyoke French after her honeymoon in Paris.

Kate Middleton’s successful application for membership in The House of Windsor resurrects the social role of a university education for the upwardly mobile, post-modern woman. That Miss Middleton will become Her Royal Highness, The Princess of Wales, aka Mrs. Windsor at the same time the UK university system faces fundamental revisions, which may well expel those who are “NQOCD: Not Quite Our Class Dear,” seems a phenomenal stroke of fate.

Read the rest at Inside Higher Ed (link here)

*****

We launched the University of Venus blog in February 2010 and currently have readers from over 125 countries. In October, 2010 the blog was visited by over 26,000 readers.

In July 2010 we partnered with Inside Higher Ed (a large higher ed media publication in the US) as part of a new initiative to support blogs focused on international and global higher ed.

Beginning July 12, we started blogging at University of Venus @ Inside Higher Ed. Check out our new home and join the conversation (link here)

▶ Comment