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.

Given the shift towards public and institutional libraries moving towards the eBook work, this raises some interesting questions.

See Amazon, OverDrive, and Kindle! Oh my! | The Digital Immigrant.

(P.S. Not entirely convinced by Auckland Library’s Overdrive link up in terms of pragmatics – just too fiddly and unfriendly to struggle with.)

Ministry of Education’s new e-learning support site.

See enabling e-Learning – enabling eLearning

Hat tip to: Derek at Core-Ed: New online ICT-related education hub launched

Bishopdale Theological College in the Nelson Anglican diocese is looking for a new dean (The current dean Tim Harris is heading to a bishop’s role in Adelaide. See: Bishopdale dean off to Adelaide). Details are available here (PDF & Word). Applications close 30 August.

Some helpful advice on academic publishing for new academics.

• From Dissertation to Book – Manage Your Career – The Chronicle of Higher Education
• It’s a Dissertation, Not a Book – Advice – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Clearing out various links – here are some related to education.

Blog U.: 10 Guidelines for Running Synchronous Web Teaching Sessions – Technology and Learning – Inside Higher Ed

How to add EPUB books to your Kindle, take advantage of Google’s massive free library « Ernesto Burden

Tweeting Students Earn Higher Grades Than Others in Classroom Experiment – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Derek’s Blog » Planning and assessment….
A link through to a somewhat tongue-in-cheek animation about educational language and those who ‘monitor’ standards.

Digital Media and Learning on Vimeo
Via Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Archives: Digital Media and Learning: New Video Series

While I’m meandering through study leave I’ll be on the look out for books that might serve as text books for classes in 2012 and 2013. Currently I’m looking for a good, introductory text for first-year undergraduates studying contextual theology. These are students who will have done some introductory systematic theology and biblical studies (or perhaps, just turned up in class with no theological/faith background).

Current contenders are:

“Models of Contextual Theology (Faith and Cultures Series)” (Stephen B. Bevans) A solid introduction, but perhaps more suited to second/third year students with more under their belt in terms of church history and theology. Also, I find it quite dense in style and layout.

My students have enjoyed using books/excerpts from the SCM Study Guide series in the past, but there doesn’t look like there’s anything there.

Any other suggestions?

Tim points to two biblical studies positions being advertised at Carey Baptist College here in Auckland. One in Old Testament (TIm’s successor) and one in New Testament.

See Two biblical studies teaching posts – Sansblogue.