Archive for the Maynooth Category
Maynooth from the Air
Posted in Maynooth with tags Carton House, Maynooth, Maynooth University, St Patrick's College on October 12, 2020 by telescoperI came across this video of drone footage of Maynooth and surroundings and thought I’d share it here. There are plenty of shots of the St Patrick’s College and parts of Maynooth University as well as the town itself and Carton House. Judging by the state of progress of the new University building and the colour of the Virginia creeper I’d say this was filmed very recently. Enjoy!
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Who will be the next President?
Posted in Maynooth with tags Maynooth University, President of Maynooth University, Professor Philip Nolan on October 11, 2020 by telescoper
The question on everyone’s lips here at Maynooth University is who will take over from Professor Philip Nolan when his ten-year term as President of the University comes to an end in August next year.
Over the last few months the current President has had to combine the duties of his office with those as Chair of the Epidemiological Modelling Advisory Group within the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET).
Whoever gets the job will face tough challenges even if the Covid-19 has improved by next summer because the University’s finances will have been seriously affected by the pandemic, as will those of many other institutions. That said, it is still a great opportunity in a lovely part of the world.
To quote from the advert
Following impressive growth over the past 10 years under the leadership of Professor Philip Nolan, the Governing Authority is now seeking to appoint a new President to lead this outstanding University and to build on its strategic role at regional, national and international levels. Coming at a time of great change and challenge, the new President will be expected to create, articulate and deliver, in a collegial manner, a shared vision for the future to drive the continued development of Maynooth University.
If you’re interested in applying you can find the details here.
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Posted in Biographical, Maynooth with tags Birds, Passeriformes, passerine, robin on October 10, 2020 by telescoperThe modest investment I made in bird feeders when I moved into my new house in Maynooth has paid a considerable dividend in terms of entertainment. As well as a number of starlings and sparrows, I have quite a variety of more exotic species. The other morning, while I was drinking my coffee while looking into the garden before leaving for work, I saw a robin, a great tit, a blue tit, a chaffinch, and (I think) a hedge warbler*. And that was all just in the space of 10 minutes or so.
The show was then brought to a sudden end by the arrival of two jackdaws who scared everything else off and then tried to wreck the nut feeder.
I went outside and chased them away. I have nothing against the jackdaws – they’re actually rather amusing – but I won’t have vandalism in my garden.
The hedge warbler (or dunnock or hedge sparrow, although it’s not a sparrow) is not particularly rare in Ireland but is extremely shy and never gives you a long time to look at it. I’m pretty sure the bird I saw was one, though it was gone in a flash.
The local robin, by contrast, is not shy. I see him very frequently. I think it’s male because of the very bright red of his chest colour; females of the species tend to have colours that look slightly washed out. Male or female this one is very well nourished. In fact it’s so plump as to be almost spherical.
Anyway, all these birds (including the jackdaws) are passerine species, defined by the shape of their feet: they all have three toes pointing forward and one pointing backwards. The order Passeriformes includes perching birds of all kinds, from sparrows and finches to crows and a lot more besides. In fact over half the known bird species belong to this order.
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Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags Lecturing, Panopto, Panopto Outage, Physics on October 7, 2020 by telescoperWhen we were told, at the start of this term, to move all our teaching online my initial intention was to record most of the lectures in my office for the students to watch at their leisure rather than streaming them live.
The system we’re using, Panopto, allows for both webcast (i.e. live streaming) and pre-recorded (offline) videos. I thought that only very few students would want to watch the broadcast version. I have however changed my mind about this and am now streaming all my lectures (as well as recording them for later viewing). It also meant that I could record the lectures in advance at my without being constrained by the timetable.
Last week my office wasn’t usable for recording videos because of noise from building work so I had to find somewhere else to record the videos so I decided to go to the lecture theatre at the scheduled time primarily because I knew the room would be available at that time. When I started the first lecture I thought I might as well webcast it as well, thinking only a few students would tune in. In fact, out of my class of 45 or so second-year students, about 39 were online while I did the lecture. Since then I’ve done all the lectures live and plan to do so until further notice.
A handful of students even turn up in person to the lectures. I see no problem with this. The restrictions are designed to minimize as far as possible the number of students coming to campus, but if they are here anyway because of labs (which can’t be done virtually) then why shouldn’t they come to the lectures? (Provided, of course, that they follow the public health guidance, wear masks, wash their hands, practice social distancing, etc). I find their presence very helpful, actually. Talking to an audience is far easier than talking only to a camera. You do have to remember to look at the camera though!
It is possible to edit the webcast recording before sharing it with the students. That way you can get rid of all the mistakes, hesitations and other defective bits. Starting with a 50 minute lecture that usually means you end up with about 10 minutes of good material.
Having settled on this approach I was dismayed on Monday to find the Panopto system wasn’t working in either webcast or offline recording mode. I assumed at first that I was doing something wrong but it turns out it was a major outage affecting all of Europe that went on all day. Twitter was full of comments from academics complaining about! Panopto uses cloud storage with very little being held locally so when the connectivity fails the user is helpless. I did the lecture by Teams instead, but had lost some time faffing around trying to get Panopto to work.
Yesterday morning Panopto was back working and my office was quiet so I reran the lecture using the blackboard in my office and recorded it as an offline video. That way the students now have the lecture in the right space on the Moodle page. After that I did two more lectures as webcasts using Moodle – Tuesday is a busy teaching day this term – and everything worked fine.
I think there are two morals to be drawn from this. The first is not to assume that you know what students will find useful. The second is wherever possible to have a backup plan. Putting all your eggs in the basket marked Panopto is risky.
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Posted in Biographical, Maynooth on October 5, 2020 by telescoperHere’s another post that demonstrates that I’m getting even more absent-minded in my old age.
On Friday I lost my phone. I was pretty sure I had it with me when I went to work but couldn’t find it when I was getting ready to leave for home. I hadn’t actually used it while I was at work on Friday so I convinced myself that I’d left it at home. I was wrong.
I was a bit worried that the delivery people on Saturday might assume I wasn’t in when they couldn’t contact me by the number I gave them, but they did turn up and all was well.
As soon as I got back to work this morning, I tried to retrace all the steps I’d taken on Friday in the hope of finding the missing item, but without joy. Just before leaving the office to give my lecture at 11am, increasingly worried, I emailed security to ask if anyone had handed in a phone. It was I thought a last resort.
When I got back to the office I found to my great relief an emailed reply saying that a phone matching the description I’d given had indeed been handed into them. It had been found by a cleaner in the John Hume Building (in which I gave a lecture on Friday).
I went straight over to the security lodge and proved that it was my phone, which was easy because it has fingerprint recognition. When I’d done that I was asked to sign for it and was reunited with my phone (which was undamaged). As I turned to leave I asked where it had been found. The answer left me a bit. shocked. It was found in the lecture theatre I’d been teaching in… in the waste bin!
I gave a lecture on Friday in the John Hume building but can’t really understand how my phone ended up in the bin. I remember seeing a bin near the desk at the front, so I guess I must have accidentally knocked it off the bench while trying to set up the camera.
Above all though I realised just how lucky I had been. I reckon 99 times out of 100 the cleaner would have just emptied the bin without further thought. This time, though, perhaps because there was nothing else in the in it (as the lecture theatres are largely empty these days), the cleaner spotted it and did the right thing. Had the bin been full of other rubbish it would probably not have been seen.
Losing my phone would have been hugely inconvenient on top of all the other causes of stress these days so I’m very glad I’ve got it back.
All’s well that ends well.
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Posted in Covid-19, Maynooth, Politics with tags Cotonavirus, ireland, NPHET on October 4, 2020 by telescoperWhen I saw that 613 new cases of Covid-19 were recorded in Ireland on Saturday (3rd October) it seemed obvious that the situation in Ireland was getting out of control:
Note that on this graph the new cases have been growing in a roughly linear fashion for at least a month. Since the y-axis is logarithmic this means the growth of the pandemic is roughly exponential. The 7-day moving average up to and including Saturday was 448, with no sign of an end to the upward trend.
After a meeting yesterday, the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) reviewed the following statistical developments:
In the light of these it decided to recommend an immediate jump to the highest level of restrictions, Level 5, for the entire country:
Level Five isn’t quite the same as what happened in March, largely because Schools and Colleges are intended to remain open, but it means the same widespread shutdown of the private sector. This escalation is supposed to last at least 4 weeks.
This is of course a recommendation. The imposition of these measures is up to the Government, which has to balance public health measures against economic damage. Presumably will make a decision sometime this week. Will they have the guts to stand up against the hospitality industry?
The problem is that the Government announcing restrictions and people actually abiding by them are not the same thing at all. It only takes a few people to flout the rules for the pandemic to take hold once more, and while many people are behaving sensibly, there is ample evidence of people not doing so.
What this means for us at Maynooth University remains to be seen.
UPDATE: The Government this afternoon rejected the advice of NPHET and instead moved the country to Level 3. I hope they know what they’re doing.
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Posted in Biographical, Covid-19, Maynooth on October 3, 2020 by telescoperIt’s the Saturday after a very tough week. At least I’ve got an excuse for lounging about at home because I’m waiting for a new bed to be delivered. Since I moved into my new house I’ve been sleeping in a single bed, in what will be the spare room, but when the bigger bed arrives I’ll be able to move into the main bedroom.
Last week was a tough one at work. Switching teaching online at short notice was only part of it. The building work that started late still isn’t finished so I’ve got more disruption from that to look forward to when I return to the Department on Monday.
I did at least get through the first week of online teaching. The newly installed Panopto system (which we used when I was in Cardiff) works very well, although the cameras are a bit limited. This system can webcast a lecture as well as recording it to be viewed later. I always assumed most students would watch the lectures after the event but as it turned out a majority actually viewed them live.
The sudden switch to online teaching was designed to restrict the number of students travelling to and from the University but nobody seems to have thought very much about those actually living on campus. In the case of Maynooth University that includes a sizeable fraction of first-year students whose first experience of university life is much poorer than in a normal year. I feel very sorry for this cohort but I suppose circumstances made this inevitable.
The official University line, as explained in an email (inevitably) sent out to Department Heads on Friday evening), is that teaching will be online at least until Study Week ( the week beginning 26th October). I think it’s overwhelmingly probable that we teach like this for the entire semester and there is a good chance that it will be the entire academic year. I think it would benefit us all, staff and students, if this decision were made now. There is no end in sight to Covid-19 and there is no point in pretending otherwise.
Update: the bed arrived this afternoon. It required “some self assembly”: though not on the scale of IKEA furniture that was quite hard work because the frame parts are very heavy. It’s done now though and I’m looking forward to sleeping in it tonight.
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Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags building, Noise, Online Teaching, teaching on September 29, 2020 by telescoper
The sudden switch of all our teaching online on Friday has necessitated a certain amount of improvisation. I had intended to do my introductory session on Mechanics and Special Relativity to first-year students as a kind of interactive workshop using the blackboard in Physics Hall. When we were told to move everything online I thought I’d just do yesterday’s session from my office which has quite a good blackboard and a setup I had already tested. Unfortunately however an office refurbishment project I was assured would be finished before the start of teaching but which has barely started meant that yesterday there was constant hammering and drilling in the Department. That made it impossible to do an online lecture (or do anything else) in my office. I knew there would be nobody in Physics Hall, though, so I did the lecture there to an empty room.
The camera provided in that room is fixed to a monitor at once side of the theatre and is therefore useless for capturing the blackboard, so I used my laptop camera plus a handy litter bin to raise it up. It wasn’t great but was better than nothing.
You might ask why I don’t do this from home. The answer to that is that I haven’t yet got an internet connection in the new house, so I can do online activities from there.
You might also ask why a refurbishment job, which could have been completed at any point during the summer when the building was empty, has only just started now we’ve started teaching again. If I had an answer I would tell you. I think the six people whose offices are currently unusable would like to know too, though at least they can work from home. It’s tough enough trying to keep everything together these days without this.
Fortunately today a colleague in the Department of Psychology found me a quiet place to work. It’s a small windowless cubicle normally used for experiments. At least it’s quiet. I think the next step will be a padded cell somewhere.
On the Exploitation of Postgraduates
Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags Maynooth, NUI Galway, Postgraduate students, teaching on September 27, 2020 by telescoperThinking through the implications of Friday’s announcement for teaching I saw the following advice sent out to students from Maynooth University
For the next few weeks most lectures will move online. You will be invited on-campus for practical classes, tutorials and for the teaching which requires a lot of interaction.
I can’t see significant numbers of students travelling to campus for a tutorial when they have no other teaching sessions but thinking about this yesterday I was struck by the decision that tutorials should go ahead while lectures shouldn’t. Tutorials are largely given by postgraduate students and it seems extremely unfair to me that they should be required to run the risk and incur the expense of travelling to campus in order to carry out in-person teaching, when full-time staff can minimize their chances of infection by staying at home and teaching remotely.
I’ll therefore be instructing all postgraduate tutors in my Department that they are not expected to run their tutorials on campus.
Yesterday I moaned about university staff being taken for granted but the situation is even worse for postgraduate tutors, who make an invaluable and essential contribution to teaching but are often treated horrendously badly by universities.
Take for example the scandalous situation at NUI Galway, where postgraduate students are being required to undertake 120 hours of unpaid teaching duties per year. The University’s justification for this is the following
Contributing to teaching is an integral part of the training of a research Master’s or PhD student. Teaching assists you in the acquisition of generic and transferable skills, and is an important element in the formation of a research graduate.
This may well be true but it does not constitute an argument why such work should be unpaid. I would argue that an even more “important element in the formation of a research graduate” is learning not to allow oneself to be exploited.
One of the very few things I can say I achieved in my time at Sussex was to abolish the use so-called Graduate Teaching Assistantships in the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences that required postgraduates to do unpaid teaching and make all such work voluntary and paid.
I am well aware of the reason why Galway is trying this on – it’s the chronic underfunding of Ireland’s universities and colleges exacerbated by rampant managerialism – but that’s no excuse for institutionalised exploitation. I wholeheartedly support the postgraduates at Galway refusing to carry out unpaid teaching duties and hope the University will withdraw this unjustified and iniquitous policy.
In the Dark 