Posts by Kracklite
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Not to mention the odd confidentiality clause in an out-of-court settlement when one might still want to discuss certain issues without having to quote Francis Urquhart in every post.
(OK, here it is: "You might very well think that, but I couldn't possibly comment.")
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Regarding Perigo and Wishart, please don't take me too seriously on this, but it sure is tempting to draw a parallel with Phneas Gage. There're no visible signs of metre-long tamping irons through their skulls, but maybe they've had undiagnosed strokes?
What is it with certain men who find middle age approaching and suddenly go completely barking? I'm worried enough by my hair migrating from my scalp to my nostrils without this prospect confronting me.
As I said, for legal reasons, don't take this seriously...
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Just a note, but having heard "Hillary is divisive", it's worth noting that there is quite some antipathy in the Republican right towards McCain that I've been hearing about for some time. Here's one recent story.
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Oh yes, the lolcat Titus Andronicus is sheer genius.
Has anyone else notices that locats come across like Yoda with serious dyslexia? With the pointy ears, small stature and so on, I thought that there'd be crossovers. Anyone want to try?
(I'm busy trying to make sense of Daniel Libeskind at the moment and that's enough to do my head in)
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Nope, you've got to work 'lickspittle' in somewhere. Let one of the Freuds explain why that deliciously antique invective is so popular among the wingnutterati, 'cause I'm not going there.
<irony>Thanks</irony> I'm going to need surgery to get that revolting image out of my mind now - either that or I make another determined effort tonight to kill more neurons. I think that I'll try the latter.
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SIT is not and never has been a University
True, oversimplification on my part. I should have just said words to the effect that funding formulae in the general tertiary sector had been mistaken for entitlement and that changes had been ignored.
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I am thinking seriously about doing the masters degree with Massy. Thats because it's run from the old Wellington museum.
Hmmmm. Well, I have my opinions about the M-place as an employer (and the conversion of the Museum - as does OSH). I'd advise anyone thinking of doing a master's to shop around and sound out their prospective supervisors. The advantage of a master's is that it's very dependent upon the quality of the supervisor and the working relationship that one establishes with them (someone who's good for one person may not have the chemistry with another, for instance). There are some very good individuals there teaching, I do have to say. Moreover, as a grad, you'd have quite a different relationship from an undergrad, meaning that you could manage and control the level of contact to make it suit you.
Anyway, look around and don't rush into it. It helps to think for a while about what it is that you're addressing in your study project and that can grow and develop in discussions before formal enrolment.
I am like an arts drain layer with a readers card at victoria university. I'm in it for the architecture
Hmmm. I may run into you. I'm the guy with the specs and the bad hair. I'll probably have something to say about H G Wells, even though he has little (but not nothing...) to say about architecture.
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More please. That was extremely bracing.
Grrrr... Phil Goff, unctuous lying prat... snarl... Lockwood Smith grinning Thunderbirds puppet... spit, foam... Russell Marshal, human blancmange... gibber... Maharey, Mallard...erk! (immediate stroke).
Do I sound like DFJ yet?
discovered that their expensive qualification was not the ticket they had hoped for.
One sad thing that I have noticed as I climbed the qualifications ladder is that the very fixed, formal formal of lectures and set assignments with an exam at the end is a very limited and limiting way of assessing people. One of the things that saddened me about dealing with first year students was that there's be a smallish intake of Maori and Pacific Island students, but for cultural reasons and upbringing, I think, on the whole these students - who had undeniable talent in many cases - found it difficult to cope with the undergrad format. However the more discursive and one-to-one format of higher Master's and PhD study would probably suit very well people who wanted to learn, but felt alienated from the rigid, and to be frank, industrial revolution model of standardised formats and examinations. Lots of glib talk about personalised learning interactively via the net is nonsensical - a good teacher responds to the personality and cues of their students, not acts like a complicated answering service... meaning, I suppose, that the ideal class size would be about a dozen. I'd hate to think of the costs involved to implement that however.
The end result will be that everyone needs a PhD to get an interview at McDonalds.
I know, I agree totally and it's ridiculous. Recently the administrator at my usual employer was made redundant and invited to reapply for her job and then failed to get it because she didn't have a degree. It's absurd - she was doing an excellent job and qualifications would have served no purpose whatsoever. This university - OK, it's Victoria, but it's not unique by any means - announced some years ago that as a policy, all lecturers would have PhDs. Now that's been stalled somewhat by the utter impracticality of the proposal, but the pseudo-corporatisation of universities has made them try too hard to appear by this or that set of criteria in the top ranking according to... well, whoever - the sort of people who believe annual reports, I suppose.
Or, to be cynical (ah, but am I being cynical enough?), the sort of people who don't believe annual reports but want to see that they are produced so that they can be used to cover their ample behinds should anything start to look a bit tricky.
Personally, I do see the worth of PhDs for professional reasons, and for personal reasons (well, I would, since I'm doing one), because it can focus the mind on a major project of intellectual nut-cracking (but it really does stand for "Piled Higher and Deeper", I can tell you, and I'll never be able to afford that Jag now). However, PhDs for the sake of PhDs is counterproductive for a university in many disciplines - artists don't generally do them, but an institution nonetheless may need a fine arts course, so where do they get the art lecturers? Not just from a pool of polo-necked, chin-stroking critics, I hope. Social workers don't follow the academic career path, but they might be needed in sociology, criminology and anthropology departments - and so on and so on.
And I'm seeing at least a couple of former colleagues from... um..., a place I won't name... studying PhDs (not at that place,* I note). They will get their degrees for studying some inconsequential question, but they should really just be put in pots and watered regularly.
By the way, Freeman Dyson, one of the world's most eminent theoretical physicists, protege of Bethe and (alas) Teller, never completed his PhD. He claimed it was pointless and left one unsuited to the real world of theoretical physics(!).
Right, I wasn't really drinking cocoa, it's something much stronger.
*Bitter? Moi? Yes.
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Drunk? You were lucky. All I got was a job. And in Yorkshire, too...
A job? In Yorkshire? Luxury! When I were a lad, all we had was a university education - and we had to read! We had to pay money for books and write essays about them! And when we'd finished that, we'd go home and order pizza!
No, doesn't quote have the same effect. Sorry.
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In the modern context, careers for life seem a bit dumb. There is no such thing as a job for life and I abhor the idea that personal development should cease with your first “proper” job. I don’t think employers and politicians really grasp this with respect to the education that they want to create I’m not even sure educators get it sometimes.
Heartily agree there, at least in the case of universities. Certainly going by my own experience and observing students studying degrees that are rigorously 'professional', it's absurd to expect someone straight out of the highly structured environment of school to know what their vocation will be.
There's an element of ... vindictiveness, perhaps, in forcing people to commit to immediate lifelong career choices and then to settle into a profession because there's a whopping great loan demanding payment. A lot of people get it wrong first time, but with a debt compounding, turning back or changing course is less of an easy option.
I'm also sceptical of arguments that university education be made more 'relevant' or 'useful' overall - that is, 'relevant' to a particular job. I've seen far too many students saying, in effect, "I've paid my fees, now give me my bit of paper and then give me my job and paycheck while I get drunk." "Grow the hell up, Philistine," should be my response, but I say my rudeness for outside the classroom.
That is not what I think universities are for at all - and I say that teaching, as I said, in a professional degree where representatives of the national professional body inspect every couple of years to make sure that we're in line with their own needs.
Anyway, part of the problem was earlier policies that aimed at raising education participation by funding universities according to bums on seats - it led to a lot of 'factory' style teaching, irrespective of reality. In one insitutution, intake went from a few dozen to over two hundred - without there being a proportional rise in jobs at the other end! The students were being deceived about their prospects, and frankly, we had two hundred odd (and some were very odd) coming in, but still only a few dozen with real talent and prospects. Then among the smarter ones, I've recently met up with a graduate who's decided after struggling for three years or so that a professional career didn't suit her and she wanted to go back to study postgrad. Having seen her as an undergrad, that's exactly what she should have done in the first place, but she'd been told ad nauseum that degree=job, no more, no less.
To compound the problem, a lot of polytechnics tried to recast themselves as universities. One once-venerable institution in Wellington merged with a Palmerston North-based university, with utterly diastrous results in terms of teaching and administrative quality and plummeting morale. I could say more about that, but for legal reasons I won't... I just sometimes chortle over my before and after bank statements...
Um, anyway, apart from my personal experience... what I saw was a lot of practical courses in mechanics, hairdressing etc get thrown away in favour of the more prestigious things that universities are supposed to do (it was like being trapped in a cargo cult at times... most of the time... all of the time). The people who taught those older courses didn't necessarily move on to the other, smaller unpretentious institutions - often they just quit the education system altogether. In Europe, I gather that there's a severe trades shortage and the same is happening here - fewer people teach them, fewer are told that they could do well learning them, instead it's endless production lines of law and commerce degrees, or everyone wants to be a designer or do media studies.
Funding has shifted more towards 'Performance Based research Funding', which puts pressure on academics to follow the 'publish or perish' mode. I have no problem with that in principle, as that is what universities should be for - centres of research, not graduate factories. Unfortunately, it's been clumsily executed and often academics are trying to both teach in bulk and produce recognised 'outputs'. Things at XXXXXX got very Dilbert.
What appears to be pissing Tim Shadbolt off is simply that times and polices have changed and SIT benefitted from bums on seats and would not adapt to the new model of research-based funding. That institution is a dinosaur, a poor university expecting university funding when it should be a polytechnic, even though 'polytechnic' is considered infradig nowadays. Shadbolt, in my opinion, is an idiot, with his idiocy compounded by the institution's short-sighted management and ham-fisted government policy.
What's been presented by both Key and Clark is piecemeal, lacking strategic context and relevance. I don't see either of the main parties having a coherent and practical long-range plan to deal with post-secondary education, be it trade, professional or academic. They have separate needs and none should compromise their quality by pretending to be another - and let the students have their wanderjahr before they decide on what they should do.
That said, to be inconsistent, as I have undertaken to be as my basic ethos, architecture has good historical and cultural reasons to be in a university - it's as much one of the humanities as it is a science or business.
Damn, sorry everyone for spluttering into my cocoa like this. I vowed that I wouldn't become a 'curmudgeon' (feh!) as middle age overtook me, but it seems that I am. I'll metamorphose into Karl bloody DuFresne soon, Cthulhu forbid...