meditating on enrolment

As you’ll have gathered (if you read this blog regularly), last week was an incredibly busy one for me, because I was heavily involved in the process of enrolling students for their 2009 studies. This was a new thing for me & it gave me the opportunity to think about ways to ease the enrolment […]

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just a quickie

It looks as if service might be intermittent this week – it’s enrolment-in-person week & in practice what this means is working with students on their study plans 8.30-5.00 (at least) & then doing whatever else didn’t get done during the day… So blogging has to take a bit of a back seat 🙁 But […]

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a personal ‘darwin bibliography’

At last night’s Cafe Scientique, I was asked to recommend books about Charles Darwin. So here goes. (This is my own reading list & probably quite idiosyncratic!) In no particular order: Charles Darwin: the ‘Beagle’ letters – edited by Frederick Burkhardt (2008), Cambridge University Press. I presented snippets from this in yesterday’s blog; it’s a […]

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the ‘beagle’ letters

I’m a bit short of time at the moment (enrolment, & preparing for this semester’s classes, & so on) so my reading’s a bit limited. But I’m enjoying dipping in & out of The ‘Beagle’ Letters – a collection of the letters written to & by Charles Darwin in the period January 1831 to October 1836.

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charles darwin – the man behind the science

Often, when school students learn about evolution, Darwin himself becomes almost a footnote.They might hear about Darwin’s postulates, setting out his understanding of how natural selection operates to shape the evolution of populations. They might also hear about ‘Darwin’s finches’ – the little Galapagos birds that supposedly gave him a eureka! moment. I suspect that in […]

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