Birb Katter posted:

"This is sharia law..." Nicholas Folkes in response to the banning of the Cronulla Riot memorial.

Birb Katter posted:

"This is sharia law..." Nicholas Folkes in response to the banning of the Cronulla Riot memorial.

EXAKT Science posted:

What a stupid dickhead.

Solemn Sloth posted:

who the gently caress is nicholas folkes and why should anyone care

QUACKTASTIC posted:

sharia law
sha·ria often capitalized \shə-ˈrē-ə\
noun
1. thing I don't like

checks out

Solemn Sloth posted:

who the gently caress is nicholas folkes and why should anyone care

Solemn Sloth posted:

who the gently caress is nicholas folkes and why should anyone care

Birb Katter posted:

He's this guy and he was the one trying to hold the anniversary riots that no one would give him a permit for.

EXAKT Science posted:

Wow, he's an even longer string of poor decisions than I could have possibly imagined.

Birb Katter posted:

He's this guy and he was the one trying to hold the anniversary riots that no one would give him a permit for.

Zenithe posted:

I prefer this photo:



Of his court appearance, two days ago.

EXAKT Science posted:

I bet he vapes.

open24hours posted:

They're still going ahead with the halal-free BBQ though.

SynthOrange posted:

There's pork in everything.

Even the water bottles.

Mr Chips posted:

Greg Hunt, Minister for the Environment

EXAKT Science posted:

Who's the Kermit-looking dude?

Doctor Spaceman posted:

QUACKTASTIC posted:

Hahaha how have I never seen this one before.

Mr Chips posted:

not sure if this is more appropriate for the Aus Universities thread or the IR slant makes it worth talking about here, but the VC @ Uni of WA has just come out and said the 200 professional and 100 academic staff will go next year. No details, no real rationale, just a big gently caress you. Going by the past few financial statements, the university is operating at comfortable annual surpluses, although he has recently internally criticised some academic disciplines generating less profit than MBAs for international students do.

What are the odds this is just an ambit claim and he'll back down to a more reasoned number?

Mr Chips posted:

not sure if this is more appropriate for the Aus Universities thread or the IR slant makes it worth talking about here, but the VC @ Uni of WA has just come out and said the 200 professional and 100 academic staff will go next year.

quote:

Wanted: Lecturer seeks help online to mark tertiary assignments

Students have long been able to cheat by buying their essays online but now, it seems, lecturers are getting in on the outsourcing act.

It appears that a lecturer from Port Melbourne has outsourced his academic marking through a global freelance website called Elance.

The lecturer, who refers to himself as "David", has paid $600 to a Brisbane-based media business, PrintBiz Media, for the marking of 140 3000-word assignments.

He provided a marking guide, or "rubric", and an assignment overview, and broke nearly every rule in the book on student privacy by offering to supply a "complete list of students" to the marker.

He requests the marker sign a confidentiality agreement, "as the assignments contain student intellectual property"..

"I am a lecturer at a university and need help marking assignments," he says in the advertisement posted a few months ago.

"There are 140 assignments in total, averaging about 15 pages in length and 3000 words of content. I am looking for someone to mark each assignment against the provided rubric as well as write some feedback for each student."

It is unclear which university the lecturer works for but it appears he teaches a subject in business.

It is not unusual for academics to seek a third party to grade their students' work. This is especially common with honours papers.

But in these cases, the assessors have been vetted and approved by the university.

The media business chosen to advertise for the marking job, Elance, specialises in copy writing, marketing, social media services, website design and academic writing, but it has no apparent skills or qualifications in teaching or marking, according to its website.

National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) president Jeannie Rea said she was not aware of other examples of academics privately contracting markers but said she would not be surprised if some had resorted to such measures to deal with their increasing workload.

A recent NTEU report showed more than half of academics are working more than 50 hours a week.

"Universities have massively increased their number of students without any equivalent increase in staff," Ms Rea said.

"That people would try to find ways around their situation doesn't surprise me. I hope they wouldn't do it, as it is a breach of their students' privacy … I still think it is an unusual thing to happen."

Andrew Norton, a higher education policy expert with the Grattan Institute, said privately contracting a freelancer to mark an assignment was new territory.

"There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a third party marking essays … it could actually be better in some ways because it could remove any conflict of interest that might exist. But the issue for me here is an organisation who doesn't have any relevant qualifications or ability, is doing the marking.

"The process of engaging them was clearly wrong and this should be done through the university."

Most Australian universities do not outsource their marking to third party companies but a growing number of universities internationally are outsourcing grading, using businesses such Virtual-TA, MeritTrac and Blackboard.

open24hours posted:

Seems inevitable. You don't want to be paying professors, or even lecturers, to do that crap if you don't have to.

open24hours posted:

I heard of someone doing a data mining project who paid a guy in India like one cent per photo to go through thousands of them tagging things. I mean I know it's efficient or whatever, but goddamn. Union needs to get onto it before we're all out of a job.