Author: Magda Rostron

Something light(er)-weight for the weekend – an entertaining, but also thought-provoking article from The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/all-possible-humanities-dissertations-considered-as-single-tweets It condenses into tweets all possible angles taken on research by academic theses. I find these two particularly amusing: A problem you thought you could solve defines your field; you can’t imagine the field without the problem. The name we’ve been using for […]

On the heels of our “Bring It Back Home 2015” conference (a great event!), here comes an interesting link sent to me by a former student, one clever Qatari man, who is studying Aerospace Engineering in the United States. This short video illustrates difficulties involved in “re-educating” the brain to think differently, outside its usual fixed paradigms. Yes, that’s hard […]

What are the academic, methodological and ethical boundaries of ethnography? An interesting discussion has developed in regard to ethnographic research by Alice Goffman, an American scholar and daughter of Erving Goffman.   Alice Goffman. (2014). On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City.   Article in the Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/Conflict-Over-Sociologists/230883/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en   Author’s accuracy, reliability and ethical stance […]

An interesting article by S. Pinker, Why Academics Stink at Writing.  http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Academics-Writing-Stinks/148989/ Magda  

I’ve read a very interesting article about what educational lessons there might be for the Arab world from Finland’s continuing academic success. The article is really an interview with Pasi Sahlberg, Finnish scholar and educator, who points out some socio-cultural idiosyncrasies of their system and cautions against its wholesale transfer elsewhere. For instance, Sahlberg talks about “the power and importance […]

I have recently come across two interesting pieces, the second being a response to the first. 1. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/opinion/sunday/kristof-professors-we-need-you.html?_r=1 2. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/02/why-is-academic-writing-so-academic.html Is academic writing “knotty and strange, remote and insular, technical and specialized, forbidding and clannish” as Rothman puts it, and has academia “become that way, too”? Are academics irrelevant, stuck in “a culture that glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience”, […]

Here is another interesting article – this time about decreasing proficiency in English among the French. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/11/world/europe/english-proficiency-falters-among-french.html?ref=education&_r=0 English has become a major factor in determining economic competitiveness of people and countries, and is essential for academic and professional success in the globalised world. However, there are some stirrings of a backlash against teaching it too “aggressively”. For instance, Qatar has […]

BBC, 8 Nov 2013: PhD students set kebab challenge  I have found this rather interesting: apparently, postgraduate students at Kashmir University have to pass a kebab-based test before receiving their final grades. It got me thinking, “What shall I bring to my viva? Bigos*? Pierogi? Herring and vodka?” 🙂 http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-24866275 * For the uninitiated, “bigos” is considered to be the […]

I want to share links to three different articles related to teaching I’ve come across recently (though one of them is not exactly a recent article :)). The first one is from the Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/We-Must-Prepare-PhD-Students/142893/. The main point of this piece is that post-graduate (or graduate in American edu-speak) programmes in the US pay little attention to […]

Q-TESOL proposal accepted My proposal for the 2014 Qatar TESOL Conference (21-22 Feb) has been accepted. The conference is focused on the theme of Promoting a Culture of Reading and will take place at the College of the North Atlantic-Qatar, Doha, Qatar. Title: It’s long, it’s hard, it’s boring: Student Voices on Reading As English teachers, we constantly bemoan our […]