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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 10h

My strange affectation is tudbright
The a sigh that is faintly lugudbright
Ous when you ask whavie
All my friends in Milngavie
Suspect that I come from Kirkcudbright.

Merriam-Webster @merriam-webster.com · 10h

What’s the word where you’re from that, when pronounced exactly as it looks, identifies a tourist immediately?

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 10h

Kirkcudbright has entered the chat.

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 10h

Ah yes: proper education journals, those well-known repositories of totally rigorous research.

(I introduced my first-years today to the idea that something can be very clearly and authoritatively written and still wrong. They looked at me in the same way the dog does when I say things like that.)

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 13h

Absolute classic piece of work, and if the teaching "evaluation" scam were really about evaluating teaching, that one study would have annihilated it.

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 13h

Sympathy — wishing you all the best!

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 14h

RHF museum?

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 14h

It's not as if we've known about this for a decade or more, while the turn-everything-into-numbers machine rumbled forward regardless, crushing decent education beneath its wheels.

blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

Student evaluations of teaching are not only unreliable, they are significantly biased against female instructors. - Impact of Social Sciences

A series of studies across countries and disciplines in higher education confirm that student evaluations of teaching (SET) are significantly correlated with instructor gender, with students regularly...

blogs.lse.ac.uk

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 15h

... no: no reason whatsoever why I'm swotting up yet again on the _very_ substantial literature that demonstrates that student "evaluations" of teaching are massively biased and have strongly detrimental effects on the people who are subjected to them.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Understanding the impact of biased student evaluations: an intersectional analysis of academics’ experiences in the UK higher education context

This paper aims to offer an understanding of how (intersectional) bias in student evaluations of teaching affects academics’ mental health and career progression. Despite the widespread acceptance ...

www.tandfonline.com

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 19h

Boot scraper?

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 20h

Just a sentimental old reactionary, me.

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 20h

Agreed -- at some level we desperately want everything to be about Baddies (and by implication Goodies), in much the same way that we want to assume our own side is holy and righteous and cannot do harm. It's good for getting people worked up at a rally, and desperately bad for strategy.

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 21h

At the end of the day, whatever we think about these individuals, we are going to need to negotiate with them. Personalising matters from the start will not make that negotiation any easier.

I sometimes wonder if UCU's collective brain was terminally addled by Xitter.

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 21h

I see we're leading with "VCs are paid too much", a line which does nothing to address the sector's structural problems but was really effective last time at persuading VCs to unite against us.

Can we stop getting high on our own supply of outrage and _think_ a little, please?

University and College Union (UCU) @ucu.org.uk · 2d

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Vice chancellors take record pay while staff face cuts, redundancies and impossible workloads.

Join us as we expose the hypocrisy at the top of UK universities.

www.youtube.com/live/rZRbCP0...
#WeAreTheUniversity

LIVE: Exposing Vice Chancellors across the UK - VOTE YES #WeAreTheUniversity

YouTube video by UCU - University and College Union

www.youtube.com

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 2d

Just seen a post praising as "anti-racists" a bunch of thugs who two years ago were actively celebrating a pogrom.

I'm out of here for a bit, I think.

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 2d

One of those mornings where the level of caffeine that grants wakefulness is somewhat higher than the level of caffeine that grants panic attacks.

I did manage to restrain myself from responding to the latest LLMs-in-HE email with "I need you to all die", so that's something.

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 3d

This local newspaper report (Retford, Gainsborough and Worksop Times, 18 Aug 1978) at least explains where it went.

I think the second question may forever go unanswered.

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 3d

People, for pity's sake. Human decency is not a zero-sum game; in deploring on atrocious action you do not need to waste time insinuating that the victims of another atrocious action have somehow jumped the queue for sympathy.

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 3d

Same!

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 3d

... the original record drawings of the Bridge as built had been stored in a lineside hut somewhere, which had inevitably "gone on fire".

If anyone can confirm or disprove this story, I'd be interested...

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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 3d

More background: this photo was apparently taken when Fairhurst were commissioned to look at the re-painting regime for the Bridge in the light of experience from North Sea oil rigs.

Apparently they had to start by re-surveying the entire structure, because...