‘It’s not a hobby’: reconceptualizing the place of writing in academic work

The writing activities involved in research are not fully articulated in discussions of academic work. In this context, academics say they have to disengage from other tasks in order to write, which raises fundamental questions about the place of writing in academic work. A study designed to find out more about this disengagement showed that it involved acts of engagement with writing. Reconceptualizing disengagement from other tasks as engagement with writing repositions writing as part of academic work. This is critical for new and emerging researchers: it provides concepts to underpin practices that will enable them regularly to write. This article provides a model for physical, social and cognitive engagement with writing and explores how it can be put into practice. Implications for academics and those responsible for developing research capacity are discussed.     

‘Where Cassius Clay Ends,Muhammad Ali Begins’: Sportspeople,Political Activism,and Methodology

Abstract

Muhammad Ali’s refusal to be drafted into the United States Army in June 1967 led to a conviction for draft evasion, exile from boxing, and a complex response from the newspaper press. Although press reactions to Ali’s draft resistance were overwhelmingly negative, his refusal to fight in Vietnam sowed the seeds for journalists to celebrate him as a hero upon his return to the ring four years later. Press reactions to Ali’s two names (Cassius Clay and Muhammad Ali) act as a lens for scrutinizing this attitudinal shift. This investigation involved macro and micro analyses of 12 United States newspapers. First, distant reading techniques were used to reveal distinct temporal patterns in the usage of both names. In September 1967, journalists from these publications began to use Ali’s two names far more interchangeably than they previously had. By March 1971, they had fully embraced Ali’s Muslim name over his birth name. Close reading then revealed how and why these patterns developed: changes to Ali’s persona, as well as broader cultural and political forces, prompted newspaper journalists to accept his chosen name and identity in early 1971.     

Using student learning and development outcomes to evaluate a first-year undergraduate group video project

Students in an interdisciplinary undergraduate introductory course were required to complete a group video project focused on nutrition and healthy eating. A mixed-methods approach to data collection involved observing and rating video footage of group work sessions and individual and focus group interviews. These data were analyzed and used to evaluate the effectiveness of the assignment in light of two student learning outcomes and two student development outcomes at the University of Minnesota. Positive results support the continued inclusion of the project within the course, and recommend the assignment to other programs as a viable means of promoting both content learning and affective behavioral objectives.     

Governing knowledge in the scientific community: Exploring the role of retractions in biomedicine

Although the validity of knowledge is critical to scientific progress, substantial concerns exist regarding the governance of knowledge production. While research errors are as relevant to the knowledge economy as defects are to the manufacturing economy, mechanisms to identify and signal “defective” or false knowledge are poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate one such institution - the system of scientific retractions. We analyze the universe of peer-reviewed scientific articles retracted from the biomedical literature between 1972-2006 and comparing with a matched control sample in order to identify the correlates, timing, and causal impact of scientific retractions. This effort provides insight into the workings of a distributed, peer-based system for the governance of validity in scientific knowledge. Our findings suggest that attention is a key predictor of retraction - retracted articles arise most frequently among highly-cited articles. The retraction system is expeditious in uncovering knowledge that is ever determined to be false (the mean time to retraction is less than two years) and democratic (retraction is not systematically affected by author prominence). Lastly, retraction causes an immediate, severe, and long-lived decline in future citations. Conditional on the obvious limitation that we cannot measure the absolute amount of false science in circulation, these results support the view that distributed governance systems can be designed to uncover false knowledge relatively swiftly and to mitigate the costs that false knowledge for future generations of producers.     

The Place of Educational Broadcasting in the Pre‐service Training of Teachers

This paper describes an attempt to develop a strategy for encouraging the effective utilisation of broadcast resources in pre‐service teacher training. A number of conditions that affect such effective use by staff or departments within Colleges of Education are identified. The paper then proceeds to outline the strategy adopted in mounting two exercises in Scottish Colleges of Education in an attempt to provide, for College staff, a focus of attention on the value of educational broadcasting in the pre‐service education of teachers. The first exercise described concerns the Primary Education Department in Moray House College of Education and the second, a number of Secondary Departments in Aberdeen College of Education. The value of the exercises is commented on, and the conclusion is reached that staff in Colleges of Education would benefit greatly from similar exercises mounted by the Colleges themselves.