Introduction: Future pathways for science policy and research assessment: metrics vs peer review, quality vs impact

Copyright @ 2007 Beech Tree PublishingThe idea for this special issue arose from observing contrary developments in the design of national research assessment schemes in the UK and Australia during 2006 and 2007. Alternative pathways were being forged, determined, on the one hand, by the perceived relative merits of 'metrics' (quantitative measures of research performance) and peer judgement and, on the other hand, by the value attached to scientific excellence ('quality') versus usefulness ('impact'). This special issue presents a broad range of provocative academic opinion on preferred future pathways for science policy and research assessment. It unpacks the apparent dichotomies of metrics vs peer review and quality vs impact, and considers the hazards of adopting research evaluation policies in isolation from wider developments in scientometrics (the science of research evaluation) and divorced from the practical experience of other nations (policy learning)

Beyond the 'postmodern university'

Copyright @ 2013 International Society for the Study of European Ideas. This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, 18(1), 24 - 41, 2013, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/10848770.2013.748119.As an institution, the “postmodern university” is central to the canon of today's research on higher education policy. Yet in this essay I argue that the postmodern university is a fiction that frames and inhibits our thinking about the future university. To understand why the postmodern university is a fiction, I first turn to grand theory and ask whether we can make sense of the notion of “post”-postmodernity. Second, I turn to the UK higher education sector and show that the postmodern university is a chimera, a modern artefact of competing instrumentalist, gothic, and postmodernist discourses. Third, I discuss competing visions of the future university and find that the progressive (yet modernist) agendas that re-imagine the public value of knowledge production, transmission, and contestation, are those that can move us beyond the palliative and panacea of the postmodern university

The chequered career of a cryptic concept

Copyright @ 2006 The Autho

Clicks and mortar : learning centres : locating learning and skills?

"Colleges are not the only organisations interested in learning centres. Learning centres are at the heart of many current government and other initiatives to bring the information age into education, training and public services. They have a range of goals, organisational models and resources. But are they effective? Clicks and mortar is the first in a series of FEDA publications and web-based information to explore what learning centres do, how and why they do it, and to encourage dialogue between all who are interested in their development" -- back cover

Russell on Introspection and Self-Knowledge

This chapter examines Bertrand Russell's developing views--roughly from 1911 to 1918--on the nature of introspective knowledge and subjects' most basic knowledge of themselves as themselves. It argues that Russell's theory of introspection distinguishes between direct awareness of individual psychological objects and features, the presentation of psychological complexes involving those objects and features, and introspective judgments which aim to correspond with them. It also explores his transition from believing that subjects enjoy introspective self-acquaintance, to believing that they only know themselves by self-description, and eventually to believing that self-knowledge is a logical construction. It concludes by sketching how Russell's views about introspection and self-knowledge change as a result of his adoption of neutral monism. Along the way, it sheds additional light on his acquaintance-based theory of knowledge, preference for logical constructions over inferred entities, and gradual progression towards neutral monism

The Building Breathes Together

The Building Breathes Together presents a realm of speculative, industrial habitation and alchemical production. In my instillation, I look to raise questions surrounding romantic notions of production and utility. The work introduces a surreal and haunted space of decomposition and regeneration