HACkers blog

Hot on the heels of reports linking class to educational dis/advantage - already manifest at age three - comes a report that factors in... race! Apparently, controlling for factors such as poverty, and presumably the relative proportions in the sample, the most vulnerable to failure at primary school are white boys.

Perhaps predictably, as picked up by the Guardian Education blog, the debate risks becoming mired in "who suffers most", but of greater interest to me has been the shift in discourse.

When the failures under discussion were black kids, speculation frequently cited "cultural" factors (such as a "lack of reading culture" among "immigrants" or "minorities") or hinted obliquely at questionable parenting practices; Occasionally more overtly racist commenters would cite sources ranging from contestable to discredited (including The Bell Curve) to support prejudiced notions of racial superiority.

When the failures under discussion were white boys, discourse shifted noticeably to structural factors: the feminisation of the curriculum; the disproportionate attention and affirmation of "immigrant" or "minority" kids; the demonisation of the white working class, as epitomised in the Shilpa Shetty / Jade Goody dynamic. Nowhere have I encountered speculation that the reason behind white boys' failure might be cultural or racial inferiority.

Of interest to me too is the sudden focus on gendered performance. As a tail-end Boomer, I've encountered nothing but males being outperformed by females at every level of schooling - from being clustered in the lower-streamed classes to higher rates of failure up the line, leaving senior classes significantly female - despite the disproportionate amount of attention garnered by boys in the classroom. And I very much doubt anyone could accuse the Christian National Education curriculum of the 70s of being feminised...

This relative educational failure of boys appears to be nothing new. That it now enjoys attention says more, I suspect, about political agendas than about educational performance.

What makes a 'successful' blog post? The editor of The Guardian recently posted to ask which topic would yield a record breaking number of comments - a recent post on religion solicited 1089 comments.

On the UCT Blogspot, comments of that order are unthinkable. Most posts draw none - the most (non-spam) comments on a post is 31. Hit might be a better indicator of 'success' - but the "most read" list contains only current posts, and so finding figures for "all-time most read post" becomes rather more tricky. It may be possible to distill something from the stats page with sufficient patience, but I suspect Celia's Al-Jazeera post, which amassed more than 800 hits while still current, would be the leader.

Is popularity - measured either by comment, or by hits - a valid indicator of "success"?

Given the much lauded state of management at UCT, I'm sure there will be a flood of nominations from The Knowledge Factory on the Hill for the Boss of the Year Award (details below).

There's a prize for the nominator of the winning boss, too...

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Allergic responses to something used in the current renovations in the Beattie Theatre down the passage have reminded me of other irritants emanating from that venue recently.

Grad overflow has been housed in Beattie Theatre these last couple of rounds, and performed this duty last week too. The foyer outside was transformed into a creche as some enterprising couple brought a horde of toddlers along. Given that even adults find grad boring, how they thought a wriggle of knee-highs were going to survive - well, clearly "thought" is not what they did. The toddlers discovered the wonderful acoustics - how sound in the foyer amplifies, while sound in the Beattie Theatre struggles. I'm sure everyone shared the joy of their discovery.

But by far the worst assault wafting out of the Beattie Theatre was the strains of the "national anthem".

The playing of the "national anthem" at grad was the subject of protracted debate, opposed by groups on the Left and by Liberals alike.

The Left argument - that it's a _national_ anthem, thus promoting nationalism; that this is out of keeping with the nature of a university which has since the Middle Ages been a supernational / transnational institution; that nationalism is an ideology of the Right - has merit but its impact is eroded, IMO, by the alacrity with which these same Left proponents accept funding from the national state celebrated by the anthem. Were those Leftists to surrender that portion of their salaries attributable to state funding, or to decline that portion of their operating budgets or their research funds, their argument might seem a little more credible.

The Liberal argument - positioned by the anthemists as "conservative" - is not dissimilar, resting on the separation of state from university; the assertion of academic freedom and the freedoms of expression required by scholarly pursuit. The Liberals argue that national anthems were not sung under Apartheid, or before; why should this now enter proceedings merely because the government in power is one acceptable to many in the University community? Gaudeamus, on the other hand, is what unites us as a scholarly community with others all over the world, in all other ages, for all times...

My own opposition is rather more subjective. Since encountering Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika at an impressionable age, I've had a soft spot for it, and happily sang it all those rallies, marches and illegal gatherings of the 80s although not a Charterist. This cobbled-together, ill-fitted abortion that welds bits of Nkosi Sikelela with Die Stem is abhorrent to me both aesthetically and politically. It sounds fractured, disjointed, discordant - perhaps accurately reflecting the nation it seeks to represent - and strains every sensibility and modicum of taste, but more importantly it encapsulates something which remains a potent symbol of oppression and exclusion. Those familiar with Die Stem will know it as a poem shoring up the mythology on which Apartheid rested. I refused to stand to attention when it played under Apartheid; why should I now respect the sentiments it endorses in their decline?

When the strains of the "national anthem" filter down the passage from piped grad in the Beattie Theatre, I reach for my iPod.

... And why are there no suicide bombers in Cape Town?

As a South African having grown up under Apartheid, I'm very wary of loaded terms like "terrrorist" and struggle to think of criteria that might consistently be applied to define someone as such. The media, it seems, have far less hesitation, and seem agreed that the 7 July London bombers meet the spec.

As the second anniversary approaches, News24 has posted Shiv Malik's three-part BBC-drama-that-didn't-happen focusing on the transition of Sidique Khan from Beeston boy to bomber. Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 deal variously with Malik's problems of access to the material, Sidique's story, and the broader social context in which it continues to play out. If nothing else, it's an interesting glimpse on quite how hard-nosed and insensitive reporters are prepared to be in pursuit of a story.

Of possibly more interest, though, are the issues around young people and identity - and specifically young Muslim people and identity - that Malik's article discusses. How different are thoses issues to those discussed by some of our own students in their blogs on this very blog spot? Why then do the Beeston boys become bombers, while our students do not?

In front of me lies a pile of queasy green exam scripts, awaiting the judgment of my marking pen, the top flap modestly turned back to protect the myth of anonymous marking.

Anonymous marking was, iirc, introduced to reduce bias in marking - or rather, to filter out some of the cruder kinds of prejudice. I'm not sure how anyone who's ever taught, and marked, can uphold this myth, despite the convenience of doing so.

For a start, the scripts can at best be pseudonymous, as they do not entirely lack identifiers. However, even that is disputable - in a system where student numbers are constructed out of a recognisable combination of surname consonants and first name letters, it's easy enough to guess who the students are from the student numbers. And given that one has typically been working with the students for a whole semester, one knows them by their student numbers almost as intimately as by their names or faces (in the case of absentee students, perhaps better!)

And then, of course, their handwriting leaps off the page at you. Despite wordprocessed assignments, plagiarism declarations still contain samples of handwriting and it's very difficult to ignore all the signs pointing to the person behind the script you're marking.

Perhaps in some cases this is a problem; however, most marking involves a fairly robotic process of entering the zone and spotting what you're looking for, and afterward trying to conform to some kind of normal distribution more or less so that not everyone falls within a percentage point or two of 65%.

But then again, myths persist because they serve a purpose, so perhaps we should quietly smile and nod, and continue with our marking without thinking too hard about it.

Impressed with the friendliness of the UCT Blogspot's cellphone interface - encountered via a pLog notification of a comment on one of my posts with a hotlink, while I was reading my mail via WAP - I toyed briefly with the idea of moblogging from the warm cozy space under my duvet.

Moblogging, heralded some five years back as "the Next Big Thing" in blogging, is something I've been a little reluctant to engage with to date. Essentially, the very immediacy of the medium has led me to consider that what's posted in haste is equally hastily available to the entire wired universe. Which, even when one is posting from the relative rationality of an office computer with no psychotropic drugs involved, is not always such a good thing.

Posting from the cosiness under one's duvet infinitely less so - we have policies to protect ourselves and the rest of the planet from such assaults on good taste and decency, after all - but fortunately this brief temptation was overridden by feasibility. Wonderful as the interface is, clicking the "edit" link once one has logged in to the admin interface on the blog spot merely throws one back at the summary page - the HTML version, not the cellphone version - and so prevents any actual posting from taking place. <Phew!>

The civilised world has been spared the insomniac ravings of a hypothermic - for now... At least, until the temptation lures me into signing up with moblogUK or some other such moblogging optimised site.

Hmmm - perhaps I should first invest in some pyjamas?

Higher Learning, the new HE supplement with the Meekly Wail, informs us that we have Leadership Gap in HE, there currently being four VC posts under advertisement. Now, of 23 institutions, four vacancies equates to 17% - looking around our own institutions where some sections are running on 33% occupancy (given vacancies, leave, etc) 17% of contract posts under advertisement doesn't seem particularly hysteria-worthy.

If they were all fishing in the same pond, perhaps there'd be greater cause for alarm, but it's unlikely that UCT, NMMU, Fort Hare and UniVen are all going to be short-listing and squabbling over the same applicants, given the rather different contexts and priorities.

And while the students have been rather exercised about the process of anointing the next VC to the throne, many staff have been rather less concerned about whose smiling face appears on the brochures and more concerned about Who Is To Be The Next Martin West - a post with rather more impact on the daily lives of those who sell their labour here.

"I don't really mind who we buy all those airmiles for," shrugged one staff member, "as long as he or she pays his carbon debt by buying enough Eco serfs to plant enough trees at Glenara to offfset it."

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Today is World Environment Day, so I'm sitting here in my office working with the lights off - yay!! saves electricity - but on a Mac (great design, but not so green...).

Just as a puppy is for life, not for Christmas, I think some of the ways we observe World Environment Day should be life choices rather than simply leaving the car at home for the day (and then cuddling up to the convection heater at work, drenched and grumpy, and undoing all that good karma). And the best strategy I can think of in this regard is - snip!

Child-free people are often accused of being selfish, but I've yet to hear an argument for having children that wasn't fundamentally selfish. Of course, in the absence of safe, effective and acceptable contraception, accidents happen, but luckily these days abortion on demand is available as a fix.

Each child created puts additional strain on the planet. And the wealthier you are, the greater the strain. The child of a subsistence farmer will cost the planet less in sustainability than the pampered darlings of Britney Spears or - please let this never happen - Paris Hilton. Resource consumption, disposal of waste, the size of their ecological footprint...

Love the planet a little. Spread the love, but keep your genes to yourself.

The relentless drive to early obsolescence of Microsoft, which sees serfs around the world continually chanting the mantra "upgrade upgrade upgrade" has fallen out of favour with the scientific community. Well, to the extent that there's ever been favour, this has now been reduced further.

Two of the preeminent science journals - Science and Nature - are refusing to accept submissions produced in the Microsoft Office 2007 format because of incompatibilities. Science cites incompatibilities with its internal workflow software, while Nature has issues with Microsoft's inbuilt equation editor's lack of compatibility with MathML. Not ever having met a scientist who admits to using Microsoft - it's all TeX / LaTeX or for those who really must have a GUI, Star Office on a Linus box - I shouldn't imagine this to be much of a problem, but it does raise the question of why the academic enterprise is engaging with that arch-behemoth when products like Nota Bene were actually designed for academia rather than Walmart.