Social distancing and lockdowns have disrupted university study for the past 18 months. Students are understandably stressed as shown by a dramatic drop in student satisfaction across Australia reported in the annual Student Experience Survey. Federal Education Minister Alan Tudge has drawn attention to this in calling for a “return” to on-campus study. But the world is increasingly […] … learn more→

Teenagers who stick to maths beyond the age of 16 have greater levels of certain brain chemicals that are critical for cognitive development, according to new research from the University of Oxford. The researchers, led by cognitive neuroscientist Roi Cohen Kadosh , found that students who dropped maths at 16 produced less gamma-aminobutyric acid than those who soldiered on. […] … learn more→

Ten of what, I hear you ask? Well – ten years of blogging. And 894 posts, counting this one. Not quite two posts a week for all of the ten years, but twice weekly for most of them. And given that most posts are about 1200-1400 words, then we are talking something close to a […] … learn more→

Human Rights Watch released a report last week on the Chinese government’s surveillance of Chinese mainland and Hong Kong students in Australian universities. The report found students and academics critical of China’s Communist Party are being harassed and intimidated by supporters of Beijing. Interviews with 24 pro-democracy students from mainland China and Hong Kong, and 22 […] … learn more→

Email is the lifeblood of university communications: quick, easy, painless… and so very easy to get wrong. We humans are a curious lot. We are highly social creatures but idiosyncratic. There is a lot of love, but also a lot of jostling for status and power. Academia, with its deeply middle class, coded language and […] … learn more→

With the creation of a specialty in digital and computer sciences in high school, the National Education launched in 2020 a sector of Capes dedicated to the recruitment of teachers responsible for these courses. And now, from 2021, students who so wish will also be able to prepare for the external aggregation in computer science, so […] … learn more→

It is a question that not only high school graduates ask themselves when they have to choose their future: Are you from science or literature? it is also heard in many professional fields. The short answer would be that some strive to explain physical and natural phenomena and others to understand what human beings do. Both are ways […] … learn more→

Gap talk. You know, the “this research fills a gap in the literature” line. Most of us have made this statement at some point in our academic life. It’s the most common starter for journal papers, proposals and theses, according to genre researchers. They’ve identified three moves in the game of what they call CARS, Create a […] … learn more→

For acclaimed actor Phylicia Rashad, July 1, 2021 was the official first day on the job as dean of the College of Fine Arts at Howard University. But some hoped it would also be her last. The day before, Rashad had sent out a controversial Tweet in support of her onetime “TV husband,” Bill Cosby, after a court overturned his […] … learn more→

In recent years, Australian academics have been accused of many forms of wrongful expression including racism, transphobia and anti-Semitism. Earlier this year an African-Australian researcher’s paper was accused of being racist. The research found the over-representation in crime statistics of Sudanese-born young people is not due to racial profiling. More recently a queer political action group […] … learn more→