I’ve written about the group who call themselves ‘Scientists Anonymous (NZ)’ before, in the context of determining the reliability of sources. At the time, I commented that I would have a little more confidence about the information this group was putting out there if the people involved were actually identified – as it is, they […]
Continue readingMonth: March 2012
tertiary teachers & accreditation
This is something I wrote for Talking Teaching. It doesn’t have a strong biology focus, so I hope my ‘regulars’ will forgive me :-). but I’d like to generate some discussion around this issue. Over the years I’ve had a fair number of conversations with my students about what’s involved in being a university lecturer. […]
Continue readingparasite goes bananas before s*x
That got your attention, didn’t it? It certainly got mine when I was scanning the Science alert news page a wee while ago. The parasite in question is Plasmodium, the single-celled organism that causes malaria. (I’ve written about Plasmodium before as it has a rather interesting evolutionary history.) And the research in question was published […]
Continue readingmarathon man, part II (another replay)
Since I (re)posted the first part of this story last week, I figure I’d better complete the tale today 🙂 Hopefully things will settle down a bit at work now the semester’s under way, & I can get back into some ‘proper’ writing! Possession of an Achilles tendon is only one of the things that […]
Continue readingmarathon man (rpt)
I’ve been blogging since August 2007. Which seems quite a long time, looking back on it 🙂 Anyway, because I’m kind of rushed at the moment – & on the theory that new(ish) readers might not have delved all that far into the back issues, I thought I’d repost a couple of pieces from way […]
Continue readingchanging teaching techniques
This post’s title is another one drawn from the search terms that brought people to my ‘other’ blog at Talking Teaching 🙂 I’ve written quite a lot about the benefits students may gain as a result of lecturers changing the techniques they use in the classroom. A while back I wrote about the idea of helping […]
Continue readingensuring student success
The other day my colleague Nigel Robertson (from the uni’s centre for e-learning, "WCeL") sent through a link to this article: Ensuring student success – students are not to blame. The writer, Arshad Ahmad, begins by saying that [many] students may appear to be unqualified, unprepared and uninterested. But if you believe, as I do, […]
Continue readingif meetings really lower iq…
… then there’s little hope for the world 🙂 I attend a lot of meetings; that’s the nature of my job. This morning the Dean came in & waved the front section of the NZ Herald under my nose. "Look," he said, "all those meetings are really bad for you." Scenting a way of getting […]
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