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The political expedience of public ignorance

Amplify’d from www.independent.co.uk

‘Queue jumping immigrants’ are a myth, says study

The claim that immigrants jump the queue for council houses will be exposed as a myth next week by an exhaustive national survey.

It will undermine Gordon Brown’s promise to let local authorities give “more priority” to people with local links in the allocation of empty properties. His move was widely seen yesterday as a response to the suspicion – successfully exploited in last month’s local and European elections by the British National Party – that white families were losing out to new arrivals in obtaining council or housing association homes.

The policy, echoing Mr Brown’s ill-fated “British jobs for British workers” slogan, brought warnings from the opposition and immigration groups that the Prime Minister was allowing the BNP to set the political agenda.

New arrivals in the country represented 2 per cent of the general population, but less than 3 per cent of those in social housing.Read more at www.independent.co.uk
 

It is all very well for politicians to decry the failings of researchers as ‘public intellectuals’ and their lack of contribution to an informed and mature discussion by the public. It is clear that a great deal of political mileage and opportunism is based on public ignorance, some of which is at worst actively cultivated by those in power or, at best, pandered to for political legitimation and advantage.

A space (Elgg) on the web that we control

A clip from an article in the Guardian I was interviewed for - over 3 years ago!. Apart from the Leeds Elgg evaluation project, now complete (LeedsBlogs ) there are comments from Ben Werdmuller and David Tosh, the creators of Elgg and Miles Berry who has used Elgg very successfully in a secondary education context.

Amplify’d from www.guardian.co.uk

A space on the web that we control

At Leeds University, Dr Terry Wassall is part of an informal research group that has been running a pilot of Elgg. “As well as exploring Elgg’s potential to support teaching, academic staff are interested in how the software can be used to support research and project groups, communities of interest, and individuals’ research and career development,” he says.

Elgg encourages students “to develop an online presence” and writing for and commenting on blogs “requires a style of writing that is reflective, clear and concise. It helps students to find and develop a particular type of public ‘voice’ as well as communication and presentational skills.”

“Different levels of access can be set for individual blog entries, so some posts can be fully public and others only readable by a particular group or individual, such a private post to a dissertation student or their supervisor,” says Wassall.

Read more at www.guardian.co.uk
 

Using Amplify

It has gradually dawned on me that Amplify is an enhanced Wordpress blog. I was thinking about it as a sort of social bookmarking system but it is clearly capable of much more. It is possible to post here without clipping a web page, as this post demonstrates. I will need to think about how this could be used by a group posting to the same clip log - Clog. Additional authors can be added to a Clog ok and commenting can be controlled. Pages and posts seem to be the same thing and perhaps some of the MUWP functionality is obsolete and should be hidden. I can see this as a good platform for a group of specialists for commenting on news stories blog posts, or perhaps for students to put together web research project outputs.


The decline of public intellectuals

Amplify’d from www.timeshighereducation.co.uk

Leader: Go public to prevent extinction

Knockabout popular debate appeals to few scholars, but if intellectuals disappear from the public eye, academia may suffer

Public intellectual, Fish says, is not a status but a job description, and it is a job for which scholars are not “particularly well qualified”. It is not achieved by extending one’s own professional skills but by learning those of another, entirely different profession.

These web intellectuals can speak directly to the public, communicating in a way that can be understood by any intelligent person willing to make the effort to understand. They need no platform and are unconstrained by the publishing tyranny of the research assessment exercise, ridiculous academic protocols and the narrow focus of a core specialisation beyond which few academics ever dare to venture.

Read more at www.timeshighereducation.co.uk
 

This is another unintended consequence of creeping specialism and the RAE. Many social and natural sciences have split into ever more narrow and esoteric subdisciplines. The Research Assessment Exercise in the UK for allocating research funding, by rewarding publication in journals, has led to an increase in the number of journals published for small specialist audiences. It is now quite normal for other scientists not to understand other subdisciplines and communication within the academy is a problem as well as the academy communicating with a lay public.