Advice
As I write this, colleges in Taiwan are switching to online learning for the first time since the pandemic started. This is because, for most of the past year, Taiwan was able to contain the pandemic at the border. This past week, however, marks the first time ever that there has been sustained local transmission and it is currently unclear whether or not the government can get things back under control. I actually started teaching online for the first time {+}
By Paige West and Zoë Wool During the past few months colleges and universities all over the world have shifted our teaching online because of the COVID 19 Pandemic. While many in our community have taught extraordinary online courses for decades, both because of the needs of rural and remote communities and because of the increasing global neoliberalization of higher education, many of us have not. As we scramble to put courses online for the first time ever in extremely {+}
The start of the semester is just about upon us, which probably means you are rapidly ditching your best laid plans to lovingly craft your syllabus into a gleaming gem of radical pedagogical genius and coming to terms with the Winnicottian spirit of “good enough.” Welcome back. The good news is that there is one easy addition that can make every syllabus shine a little brighter, something every good enough syllabus needs (and every kick ass syllabus has) that, thanks {+}
Jan Chipchase is a leading design researcher. Some of you may have come across his work on the anthropology of mobile phones. I discovered it by chance while flicking through a copy of Wired magazine some years back. That Wired piece became a core reading for students when I taught a Business Anthropology module at Manchester. It opened my eyes to a wider world of anthropology. Jan has extensive experience of working with interdisciplinary teams to carry out field based {+}
We all know we should bike to work, but sometimes the weather is bad, or we are late, or just feeling lazy, and so we take the car. Similarly, we all know that we shouldn’t use use PowerPoint, or if we do use PowerPoint we shouldn’t stuff them full of text and bullet points but instead use illustrative pictures. But sometimes we are running late, or just feeling lazy, or maybe even have a good reason1 for using text-heavy slides, {+}
Ever copy and paste something that should be a solid paragraph of text only to have it end up looking a mess? You could fix it using Regular Expressions, or if you prefer not to have to muddle around with code, there are a number of tools out there which can automate this kind of text cleanup for you. {+}
Let’s say that there was a revolution in your field site and the “Feline Republic” is now the “Canine Republic.” This is an easy problem to solve. You just open up your word processor and use the find and replace command, replacing every instance of “Feline” with “Canine.” But what if the canine revolution also imposed new rules for personal names, reversing the order of first and last names throughout the republic? That becomes a bit more difficult. If your {+}
I’m about to hand over after being chair of a department for over four years. Being a chair is a bit like death and taxes. If you are lucky enough to be employed on a long term contract in an academic institution you will probably end up formally managing your department. More realistically, given the ways that we as academics seek to manage ourselves and strive to defy what universities define as `leadership’, you will end up trying to manage {+}