Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

Simon Marginson was a Plenary Speaker at the 2010 Conference.

Simon Marginson is a Professor of Higher Education located in the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His work is focused on globalization and the knowledge economy, international education and education policy, with some emphasis on the Asia-Pacific region, and he has completed three reports for the OECD in these areas.

Professor Marginson’s paper International Student Security: Globalization, State, University has been published as part of the Journal of the World Universities Forum.

By Alison Moodie, in University World News

Universities are making sustainability a priority in their curricula. Food security, rapid urbanisation and climate change are just some of the complex issues that have hit societies across the world, making it imperative for universities to tackle these problems.

Dalhousie University in Canada and Stellenbosch in South Africa are among the many higher education institutions across the planet to have recognised the importance of sustainability education and added it to their curricula.

“In this century, an understanding of sustainability is critical for all of us in leadership roles,” said Professor Deborah Buszard, associate director of research and outreach at the College of Sustainability at Dalhousie University.

To read more…

From Karen MacGregor and Munyaradzi Makoni, in University World News

Universities must be “citadels not silos”, defending communities around them rather than being inward-looking, if they are to actively advance global development goals, the Association of Commonwealth Universities conference heard in Cape Town last week.

Vice-chancellors were urged to support individuals in universities who wanted to work on the Millennium Development Goals – the theme of the association’s conference of executive heads held from 25-27 April – for instance by providing concrete assurances that this would not wreck their academic careers.

A conflicting picture of universities and the MDGs emerged from the conference.

To read more…

From the journal First Monday:

The early twenty–first century networked information economy has generated new communicative fields and literacies, and new forms of knowledge production, sociality and creative expression. The emergence of decentralized techno–fields, such as Facebook, Twitter, Second Life and virtual gaming communities, on teaching, learning, institutional hierarchies and sources of authority, presents both problems and opportunities. This article claims that the current moment represents an Epistemic Break in the Academy, and this piece traces some of how this is so. In doing so, we argue that as educational products and experiences contend with other multi–mediated forms of communication, significantly more attention must be paid to the aesthetic, functional and emotional elements of multimedia design creation and modification of course materials, as these materials vie for the attention of Digital Natives. The conclusion suggests both practices and policies needed for higher education to successfully compete for student attention in the current media intensive environment.

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For colleges and universities, a sustained commitment to flexible and expert design, testing and implementation of online formats, informed by the successes of the open source movement, and consistent with Sterling’s notion of producing communication formats with low cognitive loads and low opportunity costs, is the critical task, once infrastructure is in place. Flexible communicative vehicles may well be known by their fruits. They facilitate collaborative efforts that allow participants to be both active consumers and producers. As might be inferred from the success of South Africa’s Ubuntu Linux, ambitious design projects may well require a strong and responsive executive, one that exercises power in such a way as to create opportunities for collaboration and creative and productive action from the edges of an organization (Whitworth and Friedman, 2009).

For the article…

From an editorial in Nature:

Young scientists at a Chinese genomics institute are foregoing conventional postgraduate training for the chance to be part of major scientific initiatives. Is this the way of the future?

The approach to extended postgraduate training varies from country to country. The United States and Europe, for example, have long believed that students need to finish a multiyear programme of postgraduate work before they can fully participate in the front rank of research, whether in industry or academia.

In Asia, scientific communities instead tend to value directed, practical research. In Japan, for example, industry accounts for a much higher proportion of the scientific budget than in the West, and managers there often say that they prefer university graduates who they can train in-house. As a result, relatively little emphasis is given to academic postgraduate training.

Perhaps the most extreme example of this approach is at the BGI in Shenzen, China — the genomic-sequencing juggernaut formerly known as the Beijing Genomics Institute …. Some 500 Chinese university students have already signed up to join the BGI after they graduate this summer. There they will help to piece together DNA data from an expanding set of sequences for microbes, plants and animals.

For the editorial…