Daily Junction

They say that students, academics and researchers live in a world of ideas. Well, yes we do – and what a dynamic world it is - so it is about time we broadcast them to the world. Daily Junction offers a line-up of different interactive discussion sections for each day of the week. Browse, select and/or interact with your favorite daily forum, ranging from the latest news in academia, news and global affairs editorials, and interviews with featured Graduate Junction researchers as well as other individuals making an impact upon your graduate community. You can subscribe to the whole blog or just your favorite days with the RSS feed in order to keep up to date with all the latest goings-on at Daily Junction.

If you have an important piece of information or news you would like to see featured here then please, please get in touch with the team.

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Universities Without Edges? Virtual Research Networks in the News

Two contrasting stories about the use of virtual technologies for research and teaching have been hitting the headlines in the United Kingdom this week.

At Durham University, Dr. Patricia Easteal, a law lecturer at the University of Canberra in Australia, has accepted a "virtual sabbatical" in what is believed to be the first sort of fellowship of its kind. Dr. Easteal will conduct her five months of research and teaching with staff and students at Durham, using online tools such as Skype, YouTube, blogs and wikis. She plans to teach her students via Second Life. Unfortunately, for all the freedom of cyberspace, there is no overcoming one feature of real-life geography: the 11 hour time difference between Australia and the UK means that some of her lectures and contributions will have to be pre-recorded.

One acerbic commentator on the Times Higher Education is less than impressed, though, complaining that this may just be a "grandiloquent claim" about a "virtual fellow," when academics have long been used to exchanging knowledge internationally. At Durham, Dr. Westmarland, the lecturer in criminal justice who devised the project, has acknowledged that there may be technical hitches, and that this is a test case for how effective virtual tools are for collaboration at this level.

However, Demos, the UK government think-tank, might well have applauded their efforts. In a recent report entitled The Edgeless University: Why Higher Education Must Embrace Technology, the authors find that whilst social networking and the mobile internet are commonplace among students, such tools have not yet made many inroads into the university classroom. The report argues that with their expertise universities ought to be well placed to filter "the noise of information and knowledge" that envelops students, and so should be eager "to capitalise on the connections and relationships made possible by the new information technologies." Whilst acknowledging that individual academics (such as, perhaps, those mentioned earlier) have been trying to break new ground, investment in online learning and research technologies now needs to be more strategic and sustained.

A new task force set up by the British Government, chaired by Dame Lynne Brindley, the chief executive of the British Library, aims to help with this. Backed by a new Open Learning Innovation Fund of up to £10 million from the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the group aims to enable universities "to develop greater expertise in online teaching and create centres of excellence for the delivery of online learning."

Given that Graduate Junction is a site already designed to help with virtual research connections, what do readers here think? Have universities been a bit slow off the mark in making use of the internet for networking? Or should we be a bit sceptical about the effectiveness of things like the "virtual sabbatical"?

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Procrastinations Part Deux

So, the four page a day average seems to have gone out of the window.

The problem is that no matter how thorough your initial literature review, no matter how readily you can quote facts to anyone who cares to listen and no matter how organised all your files and folders are, when push comes to shove you just can't find the damn reference anywhere. In fact it's not just that you can't remember where you put it, oh no that would be too simple, the reference has simply ceased to exist.

Vanished.

Shuffled off this mortal coil.

Pining for the fjords.

This is an ex-reference!

Eventually, of course, you do find what you were looking for. Unfortunately it turns out that it doesn't quite say what you thought it did and so you end up deleting two pages rather than adding another one. Cue a bout of late night re-reading, literature searching and drinking of strong coffee (sometimes even tea doesn't quite cut it) and you find yourself here, at three in the morning, in exactly the same place you started all those hours ago.

And so you are faced with a dilemma. Either you carry on in order to salvage some dignity from the wreckage of the day or you retire to bed, safe in the knowledge that you are in a great position to really make some headway tomorrow. In reality, however, this is a double edged sword since at this point two irrefutable truths come into play;

1 Anything you write will most likely be complete garbage.

2 Your brain has been propped up on nothing but coffee for the last five hours and there is no chance of remembering anything tomorrow.

Then the idea hits you like a bolt from the blue. Spend half an hour making some decent notes, then you don't have to write or remember anything. Genius.

Forty five minutes later you're in bed, about a minute before exhaustion takes hold. You have sweet dreams about the rapid progress you are bound to make in the morning. Tomorrow will be a good day, songs shall be sung in years to come.

It's about midday when you finally wake, your alarm clock having given up hours ago. You drag yourself out of bed to find that your housemates have put the burglar alarm on presuming you were out already. By a strange (but familiar) twist of fate the alarm doesn't go off until you are stark naked and in the shower. To top it all off the notes you have written are a complete waste of time as you can't read your own handwriting.

Perhaps this isn't going to be such a good day after all.

On a lighter note, and for all of us out there who have experienced (or will, inevitably experience) maladies of the computer through the course of our studies, I was recently reminded of this poem.

Chin up, and happy researching.

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Poster Competition Launched!!

Poster Competition Launched!! Graduate Junction is very proud to announce this really exciting opportunity. Graduate Junction is running a poster competition that will give you the opportunity to showcase your research work to the global community and at the same time give you the chance to win an iPod or a variety of cash prizes.

As a researcher, it is essential to be able to communicate your findings to as wider audience as possible. Through our poster competition we want you to have the opportunity to practice your presentation skills and communicate your findings to a broad, interdisciplinary community. Dr. Eleanor Loughlin of Durham University Graduate School will lead an international judging panel drawn from both academic and non-academic backgrounds.

The Graduate Junction community will also get the opportunity to view the judges’ top 10 entries in the following three categories Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences and Physical, Life and Health Sciences and then vote on their favourite!

Further details and information about how to enter can be found here.

Getting thinking and good luck!

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