Education From the Inside Out: A Plea for Prison Education

The article linked in above talks of the value and joys of prison education from a teacher's point of view. The author is Baz Dreisinger, an Associate Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, and the article is from the Huffington Post.

The iPad and Higher Education

The article by ProfHacker, from the US's Chronicle of Highrer Education, linked in above outlines some of the major problems I see with the value of the iPod for HE. It particularly deals with the textbook market which Apple seems to be trying to lock down even further rather than going the open source route - which of course is the route that CrimeTalk is obviously going, and has been going from the outset.

Some of you might be surprised by the story below of how a social pyschologist "faked dozens of studies and managed not to get caught for years despite his outrageous fabrications."

The Fraud Who Fooled (Almost) Everyone

I have to thank Nic Groombridge for tweeting this story @criminology4u yesterday from the Chronicle of Higher Education in the US. The comments from readers in the CHE are predictable, along the lines of 'this is untypical', 'academics are committed to truth', and 'we must be careful not to generalize from this'. I say to those readers: nonsense, such fraud is merely an extension of what academics do normally today. I speak after 33 years employed in a variety of academic institutions in a variety of countries.

As an aside, I myself once did the sleuthing at one grand old university that put one 'student' inside for 3 years - for faking a professional identity to gain entry to a postgrad course and for burglary of the premises. You might say that was an odd one, but there are many examples of impostors - because very often universities have few decent checking systems or safeguards. More common still, at the other end of the scale of seriousness, is 'salami-slicing' where research is divvied up into a number of thin slices to maximize the publication rate, a practice which by its very nature reduces the depth and quality of the content in each publication.

Amongst the well-drilled headlines that define what is happening inside the British education system in the 21^st century, one might be forgiven for not noticing what happened to freedom, the space that once existed for individual creativity and personal goals. It is not that in bygone times the system ever aimed to create that space where those values could take root - a state education system was never going to do that - rather, it is the way a space that existed by default has been progressively and ruthlessly closed down.

Increasingly, those who run the system are actively on the lookout for any space where their writ does not run. Under the corporate flag of improving the quality and performance of everyone involved in the education process, an increasingly intrusive multi-headed bureaucracy has been quietly transforming the place where it is embedded into the behaviour and units of performance that it alone specifies. As its language and systems become the lingua franca, the values that were once possible to realise within state education, irrespective of its overall purposes, have fallen by the wayside and with them, the integrity of what is being done in the name of ‘education’.

This article offers an insight into the backroom of a part of that bureaucracy – a private company that sets and assesses subject knowledge and understanding in examinations. These are the companies that tell the public, the schools, the parents, the kids and their political masters that they are providing high quality professional assessment of academic ability. Ultimately, it is they that validate perceptions of the performance of players in the education market place and everyone dances to their tune: those who write the text books, those who teach using those books, and those who rely on them in the classroom for their subject knowledge and exam performance. The impact on intellectual freedom should not be underestimated.