From GlobalHigherEd By Susan Robertson, Tue, Sep 23 2008:

Last year we carried a series of reports (see here, here and here) on the global distribution of student mobility. While the US and the UK had the lion’s share of this market, with 22% and 12% respectively, we noted China had made big gains. With 7% of the global market and in 6th place overall, it was an ‘emerging contender’ to be taken seriously, with trends suggesting that it was a serious player as a net ‘exporter’ and importer of education services.

So it was with great interest I read today’s Chronicle of Higher Education report by reporter Mara Hvistendahl, on China now being ranked in 5th place (behind the US, UK, France and Germany) as an “importer” of foreign students. See this OECD chart, from its new Education at a Glance 2008 report, to situate this development trend and China’s current position [recall that China is not an OECD member country]. [read full here]

This is a great resource for scholars and students for the historical study of global issues. For instances, the latest issue of the IHR guide, The city,  offers an impressive array of articles and resources on  history of the city, including a list of PHD thesis, key works and  numerous links to an array of  websites and articles.

History in Focus provides original articles, book reviews, and links to historical resources. The site is provided by the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London.

Link: http://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/index.html

I read this with a little bit of surprise at the chronicle of higher education news blog. Reading the article the apparent ‘unpopular’ degrees that mention are not in the humanities . In this case,  it appears that instead of reducing fees, universities are paying students directly into their bank accounts as incentive to enroll then in those degree programs.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog, by Aisha Labi, August 17, 2008:

Several British universities apparently are offering cash incentives to students to induce them to enroll in unpopular degree programs, according to an investigation by London’s Sunday Times in which undercover reporters posed as students seeking spots.

A female reporter was offered £1,000, or $2,000, to enroll in Leicester University’s undergraduate physics program and was told “that she was a strong candidate for the money partly because women were ‘underrepresented’ on the course,” the Times reported. About a third of the undergraduates in the university’s physics department are women, which the Times notes “is above the national average.”

Alan Smithers, director of Buckingham University’s Center for Education Research, told the newspaper that offering money based solely on gender was an “alarming” result of the government’s attempts at “social engineering.”

Last week, recent British high-school graduates received the results of their A-level examinations, which determine university admissions. Most places have been already allocated based on students’ anticipated grades, but universities are still scrambling to fill undersubscribed courses, and students whose grades did not meet expectations are still trying to secure spots, in a process known as “clearing.” More than 100,000 students are eligible to use the clearing system this year, Britain’s Press Association reported last week.

All but a handful of undergraduate courses of study cost the government-set maximum annual tuition of approximately $6,000, but the newspaper noted that the “booming market in cash awards to fill some courses” represents an effort by institutions, “reluctant to appear cheap,” to effectively offer discounted rates while officially charging the national norm. Institutions market the payments as scholarships, the newspaper said, but pay them directly into students’ bank accounts instead of reducing their fees, and award them without regard to financial need. —Aisha Labi

The Nationalism Project is a great website with an impressive collection of nationalism studies resources

Link:http://www.nationalismproject.org/

“In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community - - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign….” (Benedict Anderson)

From The Nationalism Project:

The Nationalism Project is one of the most widely used nationalism studies resources on the Internet and provides users with a clearinghouse of scholarly nationalism information including: leading definitions of nationalism, book reviews, web links, subject bibliographies, a bibliography of more than 2,000 journal articles, and much more. The site was createdin 1999 by Eric G.E. Zuelow, currently Assistant Professor of Modern European History at West Liberty State College. The Nationalism Project is loosely affiliated with the Association for Research on Ethnicity and Nationalism in the Americas (ARENA), an informal association of international scholars dedicated to the study of nationalism in both Northand South America.

Euratlas - Nüssli is a Swiss business specialist in historical digital cartography. The Website contains a number of free available maps of Europe from 4th century BC to the present. A useful place that can be used to exemplify the ‘artificial’ spatial construct of nations and the ever changing borderlines of states through time.

Link: http://www.euratlas.com/index.html

EuroAtlas:

Europe is presented as a cultural area delimited north by the polar circle, but limited here to degree 60, east by the Ural - Caspian - Zagros line, south by the Sahara and west by the Atlantic Ocean. Thus, on the Euratlas website you will find:

• A physical atlas of Europe which makes it possible to easily locate the geographical position of the main mountains, rivers, cities and borders. These online maps are interactive finders: you simply need to click a name and its location will appear on the general map.
• A historical atlas of Europe: history of the European area in 21 maps. These maps are designed as a tool of reference and offer a general historical vision of the last two millennia in Europe, North Africa and Near East.
• An online collection of antique maps of the 18th and 19th centuries, selected for the practical information provided like place names, roads, etc.
• The Photos section offers more than 1000 pictures of European and Mediterranean towns, landmarks and landscapes. These images are freely distributable provided that the euratlas logo remains in place.
• A clickable world atlas allowing the display of the 194 independent countries in the world with their main characteristics: long and short name in English and local language, area, population, capital etc. A separate page shows the special status territories, like Gaza, Transnistria, Karabagh, Puntland etc.

From Eldis:

Tittle: Denied status, denied education: children of North Korean women in China
Publisher: Human Rights Watch , 2008

Full text of document

This report analyses the situation faced by children of North Korean women in China. The report points out that these children lack access to education, as Chinese schools require verification of identity for admittance and continued schooling. Children born of North Korean mothers are not registered in China, as registering the child would mean exposing the mother, which would subsequently lead to her being arrested and repatriated to North Korea as an illegal economic migrant.

The report states that under domestic and international laws, China has a legal obligation to grant all children in China access to education, regardless of their legal status. North Korean or half-North Korean children should not be required to submit copies of hukou for admittance to schools or continuing schooling, nor should their parents and guardians be forced to pay bribes.

The report urges particularly the Chinese government to:

• grant all children access to education without requiring proof of legal identity
• allow hukou registration for all children with one Chinese parent without requiring verification of the identity of the other parent
• stop arresting and repatriating North Koreans, especially children and women who have children with Chinese men
• allow UNHCR access to North Koreans in China, including children, to determine their refugee status
• ratify the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children.

The report also calls on the North Korean government to:

• stop punishing North Koreans who leave, or attempt to leave, North Korea without state permission, including North Koreans who are repatriated to North Korea
• repeal all laws that criminalise leaving the country without state permission, especially the criminal law provision that defines such travel as treason.

acknowledge the right to leave the country as a basic human right.

From IPS by David Vargas, June 13, 2008:

ASUNCIÓN, Jun 13 (IPS) - After nearly two decades of apathy, the university student movement in Paraguay has made a comeback, demanding a law to grant them rebates on public transport fares and opposing a draft law on higher education reform.

Both issues are the focus of draft laws currently under debate in Congress. In the last few months students have demonstrated, marched, barricaded roads and boycotted classes to put pressure on lawmakers to vote on the proposals before Jun. 30, when the current legislative period ends.

The protesters have been demanding approval of special tickets for university students, which would halve fares on public transport for some 150,000 students attending public and private universities.

The lower house of Congress has already passed the draft law, but the students announced they would keep up the pressure until it makes it through the Senate.

The other bone of contention is a controversial proposal to reform the higher education system, which has been under consideration in parliament for two years. The students are against the reform, alleging that it would restrict their participation in decision-making and undermine the autonomy of the country’s universities.

Paraguay has five public and 16 private universities. The largest is the state National University of Asunción (UNA), with a student body of 33,000 and some 2,500 professors.

This country of six million people has one of the lowest access rates to higher education in Latin America. Less than three percent of children who enter school are estimated to go on to university after 12 years of primary and secondary education[...]

[Read full]

More news about the Minerva project. I mentioned in a previous post my deep skepticism on this direct involvement of the DOD in sponsoring social science research. This is related with the ethical problematic of instrumentalizating social research to follow military purposes. In a recent article at the Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog it is mention a essay which points out to one of the main criticisms on the Minerva initiative. In this essay , “David H. Price, an associate professor of anthropology and sociology at St. Martin’s University, warned that military-financed social science will crowd out other forms of academic inquiry”. I still believe that the participation of the NSF may not preclude some the inherent problems of this type of initiatives. For instances, Minerva final objectives may not be different from those found  in the 1960’s DOD project: Camelot.  Camelot was seen  as a component of a larger behavioral science project of social engineering whose contributions had very narrow instrumental purpose, oriented by a ‘conservative’ agenda of research,  of  finding effective instruments and knowledge to operationalize a notion of ‘order’ (e.g. anti-insurgency, etc) . The adverse reaction against Camelot in Latin America ended in a backlash against US scholars doing field research in Latin American countries.

From Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog, June 30, 2008 by David Glenn”

In a memorandum of understanding that was signed today, the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation have agreed to work cooperatively to support social-science research on topics of interest to the Pentagon.

As widely expected, the NSF has agreed to help review proposals submitted to the Pentagon’s Minerva Research Initiative, a fledgling program that will offer grants to university-based scholars to study the Chinese military, the records of Saddam Hussein’s regime, and other specific topics.

The two agencies will soon — possibly within a week — release a joint request for Minerva-related proposals. Those proposals will be judged by the NSF’s typical merit-review panels, though the Pentagon has the right to nominate experts to serve on those panels. (The Pentagon is also accepting Minerva proposals through a separate pathway known as a broad agency announcement. Proposals that are submitted via this second track will reviewed through the Defense Department’s usual processes, not by NSF panels.)

But Monday’s agreement is broader than Minerva: It also creates a mechanism through which the Department of Defense can help to finance other national-security-related proposals submitted to the NSF. In such cases, scholars will have the option to decline the Pentagon’s money. (read full here)

The Pentagon as already started to invite universities to apply for grants of research for the Minerva initiative.

An interesting article at the Guardian arguing for teaching of philosophy as a learning practice in order to develop critical thinking skills in school. Anthea Lipsett mentions the book Philosophy in Schools, edited by Dr Michael Hand of the Institute of Education and Dr Carrie Winstanley of Roehampton University. The article puts forward several arguments mentioned in this book for including philosophy in the school curriculum.

FromThe Guardian, by Anthea Lipsett, July 2 2008:

Children of all ages should study philosophy in school to develop their critical thinking skills, education experts said today.

Academics suggest that, rather than start off with Socrates, teachers use common classroom disputes to help children learn about abstract philosophical principles such as fairness, morality and punishment. They give the example of apportioning blame for spilling paint (read here)