This link came across my desk today. Blog + Twitter feed for those writing theses etc. Looks interesting.

The Thesis Whisperer.

Two recent postings connecting to the theme of student evaluations of teaching/courses/teachers etc. As it’s APR time again, they’ll be on my agenda again.

Akma » What Good Are Student Evaluations?

A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education – Advice – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Some interesting points raised in each

Jason kicked off a discussion about the relationship between (academic) theology (and theologians) and the church over at

Why is theology so disconnected from the church? #dminlgp – Jason Clark which in turn led to this Theologians and the Church? : the church and postmodern culture.

An interesting conversation to follow, especially for me after thinking about some of this for the Flinders/ACD Theology Lecture earlier this year (See: Sacred Texts in a Secular World : Teaching sacred texts in a pluralistic, multi-faith, modern university campus).

A list of helpful articles and tips for those engaged in academic writing. Might be particularly useful for grad students starting out.

• Donovan, Stephen. 2005. “How to Alienate Your Editor: A Practical Guide for Established Authors.” Journal of Scholarly Publishing no. 36 (4):238-242.
• Martin, Brian. 2008. “Surviving Referees’ Reports.” Journal of Scholarly Publishing no. 39 (3):307-311.
• AAR-Writing a Successful Annual Meeting Paper Proposa
• AAR-Making Your Presentations Disability Friendly
• AAR-I’m Presenting this Year at the AAR! or How to Present a Professional Paper at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting
• AAR-Be Brief, Be Witty, Be Seated
• How to Be an Author – Do Your Job Better – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Definitely a problem we’ve run into, where a child of ours has been asked to do a school assignment based on their use of social networking, while at the same time all or most of the children in that class are too young to meet the age requirements for the service. On the one hand, the school tries to imbue students with some kind of value system that rejects lying and unethical behaviour (according to the norms they work with in the school’s ethos), while on the other hand assuming those values don’t apply here. Mixed messages all round.

Anyway, here’s how it panned out for one set of parents. See TidBITS Opinion: How COPPA Teaches Children to Lie.

Couple of recent online learning links:

A Social Network Can Be a Learning Network – Online Learning – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Survey shows that as online enrollments have boomed, doubts about online quality persist | Inside Higher Ed

The School of Theology at the University of Auckland has a new blog up and going highlighting current news, teaching and research.

Check it out at Auckland Theology, Biblical Studies, et al.

(Useful for me to keep up with what’s going on at the School while I’m away on study leave).

Really good article by Rachel Wagner over at Ithaca College on her journey into academia and the financial and other stuggles pressures that entailed (and continues to entails) for her. Sobering stuff.

See Bootstrapping My Way Into the Ivory Tower – Advice – The Chronicle of Higher Education

BTW – I’m looking forward to her new book Godwired: Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality coming out real soon now. Should be an interesting read.

Over at Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins there a link through to the Our Space: Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World project. This project aims to develop a set of curricular materials “designed to encourage high school students to reflect on the ethical dimensions of their participation in new media environments.”

Jenkins has some more detailed discussion about it and some of the case studies here as well.

• Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Archives: OurSpace: Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World (Part One)
• Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Archives: OurSpace: Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World (Part Two)

Interesting article on student evaluations at: How to Read a Student Evaluation – Do Your Job Better – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Institutions develop a myriad of forms and processes for measuring teaching and learning effectiveness in the classroom. Some of these are formative, targeting student understanding and learning during a course, while others are, more commonly, summative – the classic course evaluation form in the last hour of a course’s semester. For academics they play a significant part in things like performance reviews, promotion, and continuation/tenure applications.
One of the things I find them useful for is getting traction to restructure courses that I’ve inherited or team-teach – always useful to be able to identify where something can by significantly improved (often will minimal effort), or to see what is working well.