|
|
Latest research and knowledge exchange news at Bournemouth University
|
|
I was tempted to head this blog ‘Dr. Arnold only two months at BU and first paper published’, but I decide this would perhaps send the wrong message to other new BU staff. Rachel completed her PhD in CMMPH and this is paper is the third publication from her thesis. The other academic publications by Dr. Arnold on Afghanistan have been in BJOG and Social Science & Medicine [2-3].
References:
The month saw the publication of the latest collaborative paper between FHSS academics, BU Visiting Faculty and NHS clinicians. Our paper ‘Design errors in vital sign charts used in consultant-led maternity units in the United Kingdom’ [1] is available for a free download from Elsevier until August 28, 2019. Till then no sign up, registration or fees are required, click here.
The authors, as part of the Modified Obstetric Warning Score (MObs) Research Group, lead by BU Visiting Faculty Richard Isaac, argue that obstetric observation charts in the UK contain poor design features. These charts have common errors such as an inappropriate use of colour, poor alignment and axes labelling. Consequently, these design errors render charts difficult to use and could compromise patient safety. The article calls for an evidence-based, standardised obstetric observation chart, which should integrate ‘human factors’ and user experience.
This research team, earlier published ‘Vital signs and other observations used to detect deterioration in pregnant women: Analysis of vital sign charts in consultant-led maternity units’. [2]
References:
Karen Fowler-Watt and Stephen Jukes are excited to share their new book: New Journalisms: Rethinking Practice, Theory and Pedagogy, which is published as paperback and e-book by Routledge this week.
It has received a range of endorsements from within the academy, industry and our international partners:
New Journalisms invites an important conversation about the future of news reporting, inspiring us to revisit familiar perspectives, challenge our assumptions, and forge fresh approaches. Taken together the chapters set in motion a dazzling array of critiques, each informed by an impassioned commitment to reinvent journalism anew in the public interest. Essential reading.
New Journalisms provides us with a much-needed road map, making a vital contribution to the debate about how to reboot journalism for this age of technological, economic and editorial disruption.
Bring together incredible faculty, journalists and students from five continents to reinvent media and you have the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change. Over a dozen years the Academy has driven a global movement for media literacy, turned news consumers into producers, encouraged social entrepreneurship, and challenged scholars to rethink everything they thought they knew. Arising from this intellectual wind tunnel, New Journalisms offers thinking we desperately need to address information overload and manipulation.
The plural in New Journalisms is important in that the edited collection focuses on not only new challenges facing journalism (in the singular) but also seeks to capture a range of new practices that are being employed across a diversity of media. The book explores how these new practices can lead to a re-imagining of journalism in terms of practice, theory and pedagogy.
It forms part of a media literacy series, Routledge Research in Media Literacy and Education, co-edited by CEMP’s Professor Julian McDougall, https://cemp.ac.uk. The book takes an innovative approach in its aim to challenge the normative discourse about practice, theory and pedagogy through encouraging contributors from industry and the academy to re-imagine journalism in all its forms.
It brings together high-profile academics, emerging researchers and well-known journalism practitioners. These include some leading figures in the field. Many of them come together each year at the Salzburg Academy on Media & Global Change: https://www.salzburgglobal.org/multi-year-series/media-academy . This global alliance of activist scholars, media makers and experimental educators, shares values reflecting a school of thought that advocates transformative pedagogies and practices, which also support civic impact. Given the current period of uncertainty and introspection in the media, the book represents a timely intervention in the debate about journalism but also aims to have a sustainable impact due to its forward-looking nature.
Not for the first time, journalism is in a period of introspection. This time, however, it is not about ‘drinking in the last chance saloon’ as a result of self-inflicted wounds after the phone hacking scandal and ensuing Leveson inquiry. Today, the crisis facing the media comes from external forces, whether it be attacks from the U.S. president, the rising voice of partisan opinion or narratives of fear. Established media appears to be drowned out and ‘the people who want to see journalism fail now have a bigger megaphone than ever’ (Bell, 2017). The Internet has perversely reinforced personal opinion as the public consumes what it wants to hear. The Internet has thus, in part, failed to deliver on the connectivity it promised.
Against this landscape, the edited collection explores a series of key themes and objectives:
− New challenges: towards a definition of ‘new journalisms’, those challenges presented by a crisis of professional identity, changing patterns of consumption and engagement with news, and issues arising from public disaffection with elites, journalism and the media
− New practices: ways of connecting publics through listening to marginalised voices, the increased potential of alternative journalisms, the impact of analytics, considering how journalists handle the rise of violent and graphic images,
− Re-imagining: how journalism education can lead to new journalisms, how to engage people in an age of distrust, pedagogies to enhance an understanding of narratives of terror and threats to human rights, teaching new ways of telling human stories.
Karen and Stephen will be discussing the book in a ‘salon’ at the Salzburg Media Academy in late July and they are hosting an official launch at BU as part of a journalism education symposium for CEMP’s Journalism Education Research Group on October 10th (2-5pm in the EBC).
Author biographies:
Dr Karen Fowler-Watt is a senior principal academic at Bournemouth University where she is research theme lead for journalism education in the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice. As a BBC journalist and editor for Radio 4 News and Current Affairs, she worked in Moscow, the Middle East, Northern Ireland, and the United States. Her research focuses on questions of empathy and voice with specific interest in reimagining journalism education, trauma awareness, and conflict reporting. She works with the Salzburg Academy on Media & Global Change and is engaged in a pedagogy project with Global Voices. https://staffprofiles.bournemouth.ac.uk/display/kfowler-watt
Stephen Jukes is Professor of Journalism in the Faculty of Media & Communication at Bournemouth University. He worked in Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas as a foreign correspondent and editor for Reuters before moving into the academic world in 2005. His research focuses on areas of objectivity and emotion in news with an emphasis on affect, trauma, and conflict journalism. He works with the Salzburg Academy on Media & Global Change, chairs the Dart Centre for Journalism & Trauma in Europe, and is a trustee of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting. https://staffprofiles.bournemouth.ac.uk/display/sjukes
The photo of the week series is a weekly series featuring photos taken by our academics and students for our Research Photography Competition, which provides a snapshot of some of the incredible research undertaken across the BU community.
This weeks photo of the week is by Phillip Wilkinson, a lecturer in Communications, from the Faculty of Media and Communications, and is titled ‘Ethnography in a Divided Community.’
The Isle of Portland is geographically and historically divided. Its only connection to mainland England is a 2-mile road. Following this road onto the Island takes you through Underhill, a concentration of villages beneath a 500ft cliff face, to Tophill, a plateau of gentrified Victorian settlements. Historically, day-labourers, quarrymen, and fishermen lived in Underhill while farmers, land-owners, and clergy lived in Tophill. Presently, the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMP) – an amalgamation of socio-economic indicators – ranks Underhill in the UK’s top 10% for deprivation. Tophill however, is a popular location for retirees, tourists, and is the site of an ambitious Academy, seeking to uplift the broader Portland community.
It is within this Academy that I undertook my research exploring the role of technology in education and a presumed inadequate use of technology to supporting learning in the home by disadvantaged families. From this I developed a programme of community workshops focussing on family co-production of digital media such as 3D printing, stop-motion animation, and blogging. Ironically, as my research exploring technology progressed the less concerned about technology it became, instead it focussed on the division on the island and its illustration of presumptions of deficiency in society more widely.
On Thursday 4 July CsJCC and NRG supported a one-day workshop that demonstrated and explored database use in Humanities Research. This was a two-part day that aimed to introduce participants to the possibilities of this approach, and then moved to discuss potential collaborative projects. It was attended by FMC colleagues and doctoral students researching multiple subjects (including English, Marketing, Advertising, Law, Journalism, Computer Animation, and Radio), and two external scholars.
Ian Stephenson (Senior Lecturer in Computer Animation and Faculty Data Champion) led the morning session, a gentle introduction to using standard query language (SQL) to ask complicated questions of multiple existing data tables. Research generates data, either during primary research or in the form of meta-data where we annotate and organise existing media. While simple notetaking can work at first, greater structure often becomes necessary as projects grow and evolve. Ian demonstrated how small, free programmes such as Postgres can easily be installed (without cost) on a laptop, providing the same power and flexibility as that of commercial datacentres to store and organise essentially unlimited amounts of data. This allows data to be securely stored, well organised, and shared between researchers, allowing us to ask new questions of the data, beyond the scope of the initial investigation.
This workshop grew out of Ian’s development of Julia Round’s database of Misty stories (available at www.juliaround.com/misty). Julia’s project explores the nature of the stories in the British girls’ comic Misty, and also contains supporting information on their creators, origins, and so forth (courtesy of online communities of scholars and fans). Her online database is searchable and will help interested readers find information on these things, but by its nature it’s not capable of asking more complicated questions. Ian developed this research into a relational database or series of interlinked tables, each focused around a subject such as stories (type, length, themes, character, etc), people (artist, writer, letterer, colourist, editor, etc), publication details (title, co-title, issue date, price, cover image, tagline, free gift, etc.), and so forth.
SQL thus enables us to ask questions that link all of this information. For example:
– In what months were new titles launched?
– When did price hikes take place and how does this look if adjusted for inflation?
– How long did merged comics titled usually last?
– Were boys and girls titles different in terms of pricing, story length, or other factors susceptible to numerical analysis?’
– Which artists’ work appeared on the covers most frequently?
– Which artists’ work appears in the internal colour (centre) pages most frequently?
– Which writers and artists most frequently worked together?
In his brief demonstration, Ian showed us some interesting statistics on a number of subjects. These included identifying patterns in story crossover points, i.e. where serials overlapped; the price rises in comics (which prior to the 1980s were not significant in the context of inflation and as compared to newspaper periodicals); and that almost all new titles were launched in February or at the end of the summer. In this way, participants saw how reconstructing simple spreadsheet data as a relational database allowed it to be expanded, interrogated and repurposed. By sharing such datasets, the borders of existing research projects can be extended and interdisciplinary and collaborative projects can be taken to new levels.
The afternoon session invited interested participants to discuss how we might collaborate on developing such a project. Discussion points included a review of what is out there already (sites such as the Grand Comics Database, Jinty blog, Girls’ Comics of Yesterday, Great News for All Readers, Down the Tubes, and so forth), and identification of what these sites do and don’t offer. It was felt that even the most inclusive sites such as the GCD don’t allow complex searches and that most sites/blogs are set up with a singular aim in mind. We thus agreed there was a demonstrable need for a live shared resource that would provide students, researchers and fans with access to a much wider dataset along with the ability to ask complex, interlinked questions of this data.
We were lucky enough to have a brief discussion with a colleague from the Law Department who advised us on copyright issues when including quotations and images, and also IP rights when incorporating data gathered by other people or the templates created to contain this. Images in particular will need to be kept within private circulation and database rights will need to be explored further to ensure we have the correct permissions from contributors.
To develop this project, first steps will be to find some server space to host this dataset. In the longer term, we will reach out to the academic and fan communities for the spreadsheet data currently held by individuals, using our existing networks and also through conference presentations demonstrating the value of this potential resource. Later steps will include expanding the scope of the database to a global level, and developing tools to allow contributors to directly add data, via funding bids or other initiatives.
The proposed database has clear benefits as a data discovery tool, with a demonstrable need from the community of comics scholars at multiple levels. It will have impact as a teaching aid and a source of primary data that will lead to research outputs.
We focus on the interesting set of reports released as people clear their desks before their summer holidays.
The OfS have published evaluations of the various learning gain projects that have been running for some time. The OfS website is very clear “The report below is independent research which we have commissioned. As such, it does not necessarily reflect the views or official position of the OfS.” You will recall that one reason for HEFCE setting up these projects was to see if a learning gain measure could be created for the TEF. The answer would seem to be “no” although given the disclaimer, that might not stop them having a go.
On the final evaluation of 13 projects, the conclusions are:
The report on the National Mixed Methods project has the following recommendations:
For policy-makers and providers
For higher education providers
And finally the report on Higher Education Learning Gain Analysis (HELGA): says:
And that brings us nicely to the next item…the OfS have published their latest review of degree classifications:
The report and Excel versions of the data tables have been published.
The use of the word “unexplained” (again) is shocking given that it means “unexplained by prior attainment and social advantage”. Inevitably this has been picked up in the media and by the Education Secretary.
BBC story here with a Damien Hinds comment:
Wonkhe point out the escalation of threat level here: “Back in December, he said “I am urging universities to tackle this serious issue and have asked the Office for Students to deal firmly with any institution found to be unreasonably inflating grades” – so this feels like threat inflation to us.”
The OfS seem to be totally unaware of the damage that their choice of language may be doing. In a blog, Susan Lapworth, the Director of competition and registration at the OFS, says about the plan to follow up with universities (emphasis added);
“To ensure that all universities, colleges and other registered providers are playing their part in maintaining the standard of degrees, we are likely to write to those providers that held degree awarding powers in 2010-11 and where the data show the most significant increases in the percentage of first class degrees awarded between 2010-11 and 2017-18. We’re focusing on providers with:
We will ask them to provide further information to help us understand how they account for these increases. We want to understand, for example, whether a provider has made recent changes to the way it calculates degree classifications, or whether it can point to other evidence – such as investment in staffing, teaching, services or facilities – that would credibly account for the ‘unexplained’ increase. We are also interested in the steps governing bodies have taken to ensure that academic governance arrangements are adequate and effective.
In seeking this additional information, we are not implying that the trends we can see in the published data indicate any form of wrongdoing from these providers – we are trying to understand better the reasons for performance that will be subject to public scrutiny and so are focusing our attention on those providers with the biggest unexplained increases. Given the significant public scrutiny of degree standards we want to understand how providers have assured themselves that they continue to apply consistent standards.
Doing so is essential to maintaining public confidence in degrees.”
There has been little to say on Brexit recently because of the speculation and posturing of the Conservative leadership race. The news is all about what the two candidates might actually do (rather than what they say they will do as some promises may turn out to be completely unachievable if the EU or Parliament don’t play ball). The Conservatives, despite bitter Brexit infighting, are keen to retain power and remain in Government, avoiding an election at all costs. However, there has been increasing talk of how a general election may now be inevitable. There is a good article in Politics Home House magazine which explains the election scenarios.
UCAS released their analysis of all full time undergraduate applications (made by end June 2019) noting a new record as almost 4 in 10 young people apply to university. Overall the number of young applications has increased by 1%, an additional 2,600 people, (despite the 1.9% fall in the young UK population). Across the UK figures are:
International
Disadvantage
For the first time, UCAS utilised the index of multiple deprivation measures to consider applications from disadvantaged communities.
UCAS have also release a new interactive dashboard should you wish to interrogate the data further.
Clare Marchant, UCAS’ Chief Executive, said:
The global appeal of UK higher education has never been clearer, with record, demographic beating application rates in England and Wales, and the steep rise in international applications, especially from China.
Today’s analysis shows how attractive undergraduate study continues to be for young people, although university isn’t the only route on offer. Our survey insight shows that around a quarter of students are interested in apprenticeships as an alternative option.
The DfE has launched a consultation on Higher Technical qualifications and published a Written Ministerial Statement to accompany it. Key points within the statement:
This is very interesting in its own right, but also because of the direction of travel.
This came up in Parliamentary questions this week.
Q – Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington): To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if he will make it his Department’s policy to exclude scientific research occupations from proposals in the immigration White Paper for a minimum salary threshold.
A – Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North):
Universities Minister, Chris Skidmore, made his fourth (and final) speech in his series on R&D investment focusing on how to bring about major increases in private R&D investment.
The previous speeches covered:
On private R&D investment he said:
The Minister goes on to set out the additional funding, including a real terms QR funding uplift, and collaborative assistance that has led to successful business gains, such as Jaguar Land Rover committing to produce it’s electric cars in the UK (previously the company had been shedding staff and moving assets due to Brexit complexities).
To respond to this challenge the minister announced 7 focal areas:
I see universities as ‘protagonists’, working with businesses to address problems where others cannot or dare not, and stimulating private investment.
Whether they are spinning out a company, licensing their IP, or undertaking contract or collaborative research with business, universities are remarkably skilled at identifying where they can have the greatest impact – locally, regionally, nationally and globally – and just getting on and doing it.
Other points made:
There are NINE new consultations and inquiries this week! Click here to view the updated tracker. Email us on policy@bournemouth.ac.uk if you’d like to contribute to any of the current consultations.
Assistive Technology: The Student Loans Company plan to put out a tender for Assistive Technology Equipment and Training, results will be published during autumn 2019.
Industry partnership: Universities Minister, Chris Skidmore, announced UK pioneering technologies under development as part of 4 new partnerships between businesses and universities. The projects aim to help UK industry and academia lead the way in bringing new products to market that contribute to tackling the big generational challenges such as climate change and the needs of an ageing society. Skidmore stressed the importance of both government and industry contributing to the Industrial Strategy ambition of raising public and private investment in research and development to 2.4% of GDP by 2027. Projects include:
Student transitions: Education Secretary Damian Hinds announced ‘Leapskills Workshops’, developed by student accommodation provider Unite Students which offer schools and colleges resources to teach Year 12 and 13 pupils about independent living, managing money and dealing with conflict. The sessions aim to act as a digital interactive masterclass to enhance how schools and colleges teach young people about what to expect and how to prepare for the leap of living away from home for the first time.
Apprenticeships: The DfE have published a summary document giving Apprenticeships and Traineeships figures. The data shows how higher level apprenticeships have boomed (68% growth since last year) with the main decline at the intermediate apprenticeship level. Apprenticeship starts from mature (19+) learners has increased by 13.8%.
To subscribe to the weekly policy update simply email policy@bournemouth.ac.uk
JANE FORSTER | SARAH CARTER
Policy Advisor Policy & Public Affairs Officer
Follow: @PolicyBU on Twitter | policy@bournemouth.ac.uk
Roman Gerodimos, Bournemouth University
As polls closed in Greece on July 7, with pollsters predicting a convincing victory for the centre-right New Democracy and a defeat for the left-wing Syriza government of Alexis Tsipras, an unusual sense of calm prevailed across the country. Rarely has a Greek election night been so quiet.
New Democracy’s incoming prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, went out of his way to unite and manage expectations. His supporters were just relieved to have ousted Tsipras. Tsipras himself looked relieved, having managed to reverse his party’s losses at the recent European Parliament elections, to win a respectable 31.5% of the vote, which will allow him to remain as a strong second pole in the system. With 39.9% of the vote, New Democracy will have 158 seats in the Greek parliament, an outright majority.
Smaller parties all put on a happy face for their own internal reasons, with the exception of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, which failed to pass the 3% threshold to elect MPs. It looked as if Greece had finally attained what it had been desperately seeking for one long decade: a sense of normalcy.
Exactly ten years ago, in the summer of 2009, the first signs that Greece was in economic trouble started to become apparent. As the markets’ confidence in Greek bonds collapsed, the government turned to the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Within weeks it had entered a vortex of excruciating negotiations, conditional bailouts and tough austerity measures that went on and on. To an extent these are still going on and, in different forms, are expected to go on for much of the 21st century.
It’s hard to overstate the impact of the crisis and austerity on Greek society. Beyond the obvious effects – unemployment reaching 25%, hundreds of thousands of mostly young and well-educated people leaving the country to seek employment abroad, pensions and public services facing severe cuts – the political system was rattled. One of the two main pillars of the post-1974 system, the centre-left PASOK, collapsed. Far right parties such as Golden Dawn and the xenophobic, homophobic Independent Greeks – entered parliament.
The crisis has been the single biggest challenge to Greece’s survival since World War II. Its root causes, the way Greeks were stereotyped in the world’s media, and the way lenders and successive Greek governments designed and implemented austerity measures, all became sources of collective shame and humiliation. This in turn polarised a political culture that has been historically prone to bouts of instability and violence.
Tsipras weaponised and normalised this populist narrative of victimhood, pitting the “innocent people” against “the corrupt elites”, including Greece’s EU partners and lenders. As I have shown in my research, this narrative was also used by far-left radical groups to justify revenge and aggression.
Political violence tripled between 2008 and 2018. Far-left violence was 3.5 times bigger in scale than far-right violence, which itself soared. Low-level incidents are a daily occurrence with thousands of them having taken place during the decade of the crisis, especially before Syriza got into power. Radicalisation and extremism have been particularly prominent among young people. While many are politically apathetic, those who do engage tend to do so in radical ways. Golden Dawn drew most of its supporters from the 18-25 age group, while Syriza has consistently topped the polls in that group.
The January and September 2015 victories of Syriza, which governed in alliance with the Independent Greeks, acted as pressure valves that allowed Greek society to vent a lot of its anger and frustration. That radicalism, which was such a prominent element of Greek political culture during the first period of the crisis, gradually ran out of steam.
From January to June 2015, Yanis Varoufakis, the flamboyant poster boy of the “Caviar left”, led catastrophic and slightly surreal negotiations with EU and IMF lenders. These ended up costing Greece billions of euros, triggered a bank run and capital controls, caused it to default on its debts to the IMF and brought it within hours of exiting the Eurozone. Eventually, Tsipras did a U-turn and, in late 2015 began implementing all of the lenders’ requests, effectively showing that there really was no alternative to austerity.
Since being elected leader of New Democracy in 2016, Mitsotakis worked hard to renew his party. In the space of three years, he managed to turn an out of touch, old-school, conservative party into a modern, liberal, social media savvy electoral machine. While banking on his image as a well-educated and professionally successful technocrat who will cut taxes and facilitate foreign direct investment, he also placed strategic emphasis on the youth vote.
He voted in favour of civil partnerships for same-sex couples and spent time meeting with drug addicts in rough parts of Athens. He also carried out a radical renewal of New Democracy’s parliamentary candidates and party workers, promoting many people in their 20s, 30s and 40s. In doing so, he managed to build up support in the crucial 18-24 demographic, reaching 27%-30% in the recent elections, and so ending Syriza’s monopoly on the youth vote.
Whether Greece has really entered a new era of normalcy will become apparent fairly soon. One of the first moves Mitsotakis pledged to take is to scrap the so-called “asylum” law, which forbids police from entering university premises. As a result of the law, urban university campuses have become hotspots of crime, vandalism, drug-dealing and anarchist propaganda and public opinion has recently shifted in favour of taking action. However, far-left groups still carry street credit in universities and in the urban pocket of Exarchia in downtown Athens, where law-and-order has completely collapsed.
On election day in Greece, the only incident that broke the peaceful hum of post-election dinner parties took place there: a previously unknown anarchist group stole and burnt a ballot box, threatened electoral clerks and threw tear gas. What happens at Exarchia over the next few months – whether and how the government decides to enforce the law and how young people and wider society react – will be the best indicator of whether Greece has truly turned the page.
Roman Gerodimos, Associate Professor of Global Current Affairs, Bournemouth University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
John McAlaney, Bournemouth University
British Airways (BA) has received a record fine of £183m after details of around 500,000 of its customers were stolen in a data breach in summer 2018. The fine was possible thanks to new rules introduced last year by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which gave the British regulator powers to impose much larger penalties on companies that fail to protect their customers’ data.
But fines like these don’t just act as a business deterrent because of their financial cost. They are a method of public shaming that we can use as a form of social control to force companies to act more ethically. And research on consumer behaviour has demonstrated that social (dis)approval can be a more powerful motivator than financial factors.
The public nature of the fine is embarrassing for BA, as it reminds the public of the data breach and delivers an official verdict that the company was at fault. The huge size of the fine also indicates how serious the breach was. As a result, BA will rightly be worried about what damage the fine might do to its reputation.
Reputation is a valuable commodity for companies, and in some instances can be more important to consumers than the price of products when they are choosing who to buy from. We tend to make simplistic conclusions about the people and groups around us based on their behaviour, a phenomenon known as fundamental attribution error. This suggests a fine could lead consumers to conclude that if a company cannot protect its data – regardless of whether it has any value – then it should not be trusted on other aspects of its operations.
Although GDPR has hugely increased the size of the penalties for breaches, BA isn’t the first organisation the UK has publicly fined for breaking data protection rules, and others include Facebook, Uber and the Royal Mail. Given the importance of reputation to companies, there’s a chance these organisations would have rather accepted a higher fine in exchange for the amount not being made public.
The fine won’t just have an impact on BA either. Online data breaches are relatively new phenomena, but this sort of public shaming is an old method of social control. It sets and reinforces social norms and standards about what all organisations should be expected to be able to achieve, a message that can be intended for both businesses and the public.
My research has shown how social norms have a powerful influence over people’s behaviours and attitudes. We judge ourselves and others in relation to adherence to our collective perceptions of how we, as a society, believe we should be performing.
It’s not easy for a society to reach a consensus on what a social norm should be for a new phenomenon, especially in situations where we are uncertain about our own degree of knowledge and understanding. For most people, hacking and hackers remain a relatively murky and ill-defined threat that is hard to define or quantify, and the dangers of having your data released into the wild aren’t easy to see.
But there is evidence that consumers are becoming more concerned about businesses that do not keep their data secure, particularly after the introduction of GDPR. High-profile businesses receiving major fines could help spur this process further.
But that’s not the end of the story. At the time of the breach, BA described it as a “sophisticated, malicious, criminal attack”. This sort of narrative implies it’s difficult for organisations to protect themselves against highly motivated and technically skilled criminals. Hollywood portrayals of hackers as hoodie-wearing lone geniuses support this idea that it’s impossible for any organisation to fully prevent attacks.
While not exactly putting a positive spin on a company’s involvement in a data breach, this idea does limit the damage done to its reputation. It assumes that organisations are already doing everything they can reasonably do to protect their systems and customers.
Hacker communities take a very different position, arguing that many large organisations fail to take the basic steps that could be expected of them, despite having the resources to do so. If this is the case, we can expect to see more companies hit by penalties that could be even larger (the UK’s rules allow fines of up to 4% of a company’s turnover).
But social norms are fluid. What can seem shocking or extreme at one moment can quickly become the new normal. Heavy fines always cause financial pain to organisations, but if they become widely used and publicly reported then there’s a risk that they become seen as the cost of doing business, as arguably has happened with fines relating to health and safety. This would make fines less damaging to a company’s reputation and so less useful in forcing firms to do their best to protect customer data.
As such, only a strategic use of fines will help the public see how serious it is when organisations fail to live up to the data standards our new laws have set. If this is achieved then it may help the public understand the seriousness of data security, and in turn take greater responsibility over their own safety online.
John McAlaney, Associate Professor in Psychology, Bournemouth University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
FHSS PhD student Alice Ladur has been awarded a small but very competitive grant by FfWG, the Funds for Women Graduates. FfWG is the trading name of the BFWG Charitable Foundation and the BFWG (British Federation of Women Graduates), which is affiliated to the International Federation of University Women.
Alice is based in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH). Her PhD research in Uganda is supervised by Prof. Vanora Hundley and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen. Her thesis research has already resulted in an academic paper published in the international journal BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth, which Open Access.
September 10th 11:00 – 14:00 Talbot Campus
Members of the British Academy are visiting BU on Tuesday 10th September.
There will be a presentation late morning, looking at their portfolio of funding opportunities and providing useful information on their application and assessment processes, with some handy top tips. This will be followed by a networking lunch.
To book, please contact Theresa McManus.
Please put the date in your diaries!
A slightly quieter week in HE policy, dominated by the release of the latest NSS data, which if course has policy implications as:
The Lords have been debating the implications of Augar. This week the Lords debated more of the substance of the Augar review. As expected much of the session was about the FE agenda and regularly mentioned the importance of apprenticeships.
It was emphasised that because of future automation of jobs it is essential for the full post-18 system to be flexible and to enable all ages to dip in and out of learning.
The Lords HE Spokesperson, Lord Younger, reiterated familiar messages for young people about making informed choices and for technical routes to receive equal status with academic. “To ensure a genuine choice for young people, and to give employers access to a highly skilled workforce, we want to see a system where technical education has the same weighting for a young person as an academic route.”
Lord Younger raised (familiar) issues that the Government raises:
However, he said: I share the Secretary of State’s strong belief that both the HE and FE sectors can, and should, continue to thrive together.
Lord Storey (Liberal Democrat Spokesperson for Young People and Education) criticised HE for stating proposed fee cuts would affect disadvantaged students and result in reducing outreach programmes and held up FE as a shining light and poor cousin in comparison.
He went on to criticise the elitist view that schools and parents judge their pupils’ success by how many go to university….But actually, a vocational education or apprenticeship might be better for many young people. Further education is often seen as for other people’s children…With schools incentivised to direct their students into the school sixth form and then to university, many students are not even told about the vocational options or apprenticeship routes open to them. He continued on to criticise schools for not providing enough support or information on apprenticeships.
Baroness Tessa Blackstone (Labour Independent) also focussed on FE requiring more resources. In relation to HE she said:
On FE she called for the need to rebalance spending priorities towards the 50% of the population who do not go to university and “I end with a plea to the Government: please mend your ways and put the FE sector at the centre of the education system”.
Several Lords highlighted doubt that if tuition fees were cut, income shortfalls for universities would be made up by some form of Government grant (including Lord Patten and Lord Blunkett). Lord Blunkett said it was naïve to believe the Treasury would make up the shortfall and criticised the calculations behind the Augar review as “ingenious creative accounting, which led to the belief that it would be possible, on an annualised basis, to present the changes at £700 million”.
There was also criticism of the potential formula shifting funding away from humanities to STEM subjects as “absurd”.
Lord Patten on Brexit said:
Whereas on the increase to £9,000 fees Lord Adonis (Labour) said:
The Lord Bishop of Winchester said Augar proposals weren’t extreme enough. Even after restoring the teaching block grant and reintroducing maintenance grants the Bishop said:
Lord Blunkett welcomed the recommendations for part time students, the maintenance grants and support for FE learning. He criticised the LEO data for not including self-employment, the size of the employer (level of affordable pay) or regional fluctuations in earnings. He emphasised the importance of universities an anchor institutions within a community, particularly for the disadvantaged and urged: If we damage the university sector in our country by cutting funding to teachers and reducing numbers or discriminating against particular courses because the national press do not like them, we will regret it down the line.
Lord Bichard highlighted that the reduction in HE fees is insufficient to change the mindset of prospective students, not least when the term for repayment is extended from 30 years to 40 years, the income threshold at which loans are repaid is reduced from £25,000 to £23,000 and the interest charges, post graduation, remain at 6%… Taken together, these fee proposals are regressive, with the well-off paying less—something like £25,000 less during their life—while those on middle and lower earnings will pay some £12,000 more, according to the DfE. Given that the review recommends that the Government make good the loss of income to institutions as a result of these fee changes, and given that the fee changes are not going to benefit students in any great respect, this seems to be a flawed set of proposals. He also highlighted that the review does not tackle the issue of affordability for mature and part time students, including the lack of part time/distance maintenance loans. The Lord highlighted how the opposite policy in Wales has resulted in a 35% increase in part time UG students.
Lord Kakkar raised the substantial cross subsidisation of research activity through tuition fees and challenged the Government to consider how justifiable recommendations on increased support for further education and lifelong learning could be reconciled with the need to stabilise the research base in universities (which delivers the Government’s research and development targets and is crucial to the industrial strategy).
Lord Kerslake said the Augar review was unable to make sound HE related recommendations because it was hampered by the Government’s red lines:
And on robbing the HE Peter to pay the FE Paul Lord Kerslake said: There is no great nobility in austerity that should compel us to transfer funding from one part of the sector to the other.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD) welcomed the reports sensitivity to the need to align the skills system with the needs of the economy and deliver high quality alternatives to traditional three-year residential undergraduate degree. She also championed investment in community adult learning facilities to support adult learners who need more informal settings to study within.
The Opposition Spokesperson for Higher and Further Education, Lord Bassam of Brighton, was keen to point out that cross subsidisation through research grants and international student recruitment was not possible for all universities and not every university has the option of seeking new student markets abroad. “These smaller, modern local universities tend to have the most diverse intake of young people and are therefore core engines of social mobility. They are most vulnerable.”
APPG Universities
Alistair Jarvis has written for the APPG University Group on Augar: the good, the risks and the challenges. He expresses concern for the removal of loan support for foundation years and the restrictions on degree apprenticeships were students already have a degree. On the challenges he covers:
He states UUK are working on all four of these but there is an undertone that the Government needs to meet the sector halfway.
The Minister for Universities has confirmed that EU students will continue to be eligible for UKRI post-graduate training support for courses starting in 2020/21, for the duration of their courses. This is good news and follows the similar announcement made in May. about EU undergraduate students accessing student finance.
We’re likely to see the value for money debate coming back into focus as we head towards the late autumn spending review. The RAB (the Government’s accounting value for spending on loans that won’t be repaid) has risen to 47% (+2% since last year). Education SoS, Damian Hinds, spoke about the rise:
It is often overlooked just how much the Government, and therefore the taxpayer, contributes to student loans being taken out in England…Today’s figures highlight just how progressive our system is, but also reiterates the need for universities to deliver value for money on courses – not just for students, but the taxpayer as well.
The DfE said that the data also highlighted that the Master’s loan system does not require any subsidy from the government, with the majority of students studying at this advanced level going on to pay back their loans in full.
HE fee levels are a key aspect of Augar and were an important campaigning point in the last general election. We can expect the new Conservative leader to reveal their standpoint on fees early in their tenure (assuming they survive Brexit).
The Universities and Science Minister has confirmed an additional £91 million for university-led research.
Commenting on the announcement of £91 million in additional university-driven research funding, including a £45 million increase in QR funding, Alistair Jarvis, Chief Executive of Universities UK, said:
The detailed budget allocations are available on the Research England website.
SUBU’s Sophie reflects on student representation:
Summer is a time of change in Students’ Unions as incoming elected Full-Time Officers begin the handover process and re-elected officers start making plans for the year ahead. In SUBU, this is Brad Powell’s last week as Vice President Welfare and Equal Opportunities and he will be taking everything he has learned over the last year to channel it into a Master’s degree at the University of Surrey. We welcome Joanna Ann, who was elected by BU students back in March to represent their welfare issues and champion their equality. Her handover has begun and she is being inducted into the responsibilities and expectations of being a representative, which will continue over the summer, joining the re-elected officers; Abidemi Abiodun- VP Welfare, Ade Balogun- President, Lea Ediale- VP Activities and Lenrick Greaves- VP Education.
Considering so many people develop their understanding of policy and decision-making from undertaking student representative roles – whether in school as a school councillor or perhaps at a local level as a voluntary Member of Youth Parliament, or whilst in University as an elected paid Full-Time officer, or lead of a club or society – the impact that it can have on people’s lives and future job prospects hasn’t been well documented.
Both contenders for the UK’s next Prime Minister, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt, were representatives whilst studying at Oxford; Boris as the President of Oxford Union and Jeremy as President of the Conservative Association. I’m sure that if asked, they could tell you at least 3 things about how it helped develop them in relation to where they are today. We have seen funding cuts for youth/student democracy in local authorities as budgets are tightened; without an impact measure of how helpful undertaking student representative roles are, these valuable opportunities continue to be under threat.
As the new Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole council come together and make decisions on funding allocation for services; it will be interesting to see what the future holds for student/youth democracy such as support for UK Youth Parliament in this local area. Currently only Poole has a member of youth parliament and deputy; they now find themselves representing young people across 3 areas, with uncertainty about whether youth parliament will still have a role locally in the future. A Wonkhe article yesterday asked ‘What role should students and their SU’s play in the community?’ and perhaps part of that should be to reinforce the importance of having the student/youth voice at local, regional and national decision-making tables.
This is where we need those who have experienced positive impact from taking part in representative opportunities to talk about how it helped them. On the 22nd June I was invited to the first British Youth Council convention of the year to be their keynote speaker and inspire the newly elected student representatives, talking them through all the different opportunities that they have opened up for themselves by taking part in something so important. I also ran a couple of workshops on leading successful campaigns because I wanted to give back to a movement which has got me to where I am today. British Youth Council is an organisation funded through the Government to ‘empower young people across the UK to have a say and be heard’ and it supports UK Youth Parliament, along with other similar initiatives. I shared my experiences at the convention of being a youth representative from the age of 12 and the opportunities that have shaped me, such as being part of the first group of Members of Youth Parliament (MYPs) to debate in the House of Commons, 10 years ago this year. As I was talking I was struck by how much the support, resources and funding have been cut. Another thing I noticed, and mentioned in my speech, was that one of their key campaigns continues to be the same as when I was in the role – lowering the voting age for 16 and 17 years olds to have the right to vote, so they too can influence key decisions that affect their lives. Without this important right the voices of young people can be brushed aside. [It’s been debated many times in Parliament but was tabled once again in April of this year as it was not part of the Conservative manifesto pledges.]
If you take the example of Brexit, the referendum took place 3 years ago this month and students who were 16 and 17 at the time did not have the right to vote on something affecting their future. They are now of voting age, but the decision was taken out of their hands.
We’ve seen the impact that Greta Thunberg has had on the world; demonstrating the power that students and young people collectively have when they come together on an issue they are passionate about, as well as doing this above party politics. The UK Youth Parliament demonstrate every year how students and young people are a force to be reckoned with, making national manifesto commitments to supporting mental health, tackling knife crime, and fighting to lower the voting age to 16. We especially see this when they debate in the House of Commons and demonstrate more mature forms of debate than their ‘adult’ counterparts. Here you can see Francesca Reed, former MYP for Poole, introduce a motion in the House of Commons on improving mental health services.
Meanwhile, BU continues to look at ways students can have a voice at different levels of the institution. The importance of the student voice has been enshrined not only in BU2025 but is also a key component of the QAA’s Quality code, which was influenced by SUs around the country (see Wonkhe). It has expectations and practices on how students should be actively engaged in quality assurance and enhancement processes: “effective student engagement contributes to quality assurance and enhancement processes by capturing the voices of all students”.
BU recently completed a Focussed Enhancement Review (FER) on the Student Voice in line with BU2025. BU and SUBU representatives looked at how the student voice can be enhanced in different areas. Students fed into the FER on the Student Voice through their Vice President Education Lenrick Greaves, who was part of the FER, and also through a student consultation event held by the Students’ Union back in May. Work continues on enhancing the Student Voice at BU through a task and finish group. Perhaps more can be done by institutions to show how the student voice is important in decision-making to influence local authorities to do the same. Until then, the question remains about the future of student representation outside of a University setting.
Future demand: In last week’s policy update we talked about the popularity of particular subjects. This week there is a Wonkhe blog which analyses GCSE and A level data to predict the future demand for a range of degree subjects.
Loan deals: text Moneysavingexpert are urging pre-1998 students to think carefully and pointing out the risks in the letters such students have received offering to wipe their debt if they repay 20% of their loan value. Finance company Erudio currently own these loan books. Read more here.
Disabled Experience: Wonkhe report that Think tank Demos has launched a discussion paper on the experiences of disabled graduates in the UK. The paper considers barriers disabled graduates face in participating in the workforce including using public transport and finding accessible housing, and recommends that a body be created within the Cabinet Office to design a programme to enable disabled graduates to fulfil their potential.
Contract Cheating: Lord Story continues his tireless campaign to bring down the essay mill businesses promoting and profiting from contract cheating. The Lord has tabled a private member’s bill to “make it an offence to provide or advertise cheating services for higher education assessment” in England and Wales.
To subscribe to the weekly policy update simply email policy@bournemouth.ac.uk
JANE FORSTER | SARAH CARTER
Policy Advisor Policy & Public Affairs Officer
Follow: @PolicyBU on Twitter | policy@bournemouth.ac.uk
BU is going through a process of re-commissioning its research centres this month. Existing centres, like ours CMMPH (the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health) were required to submit evidence of their contribution to BU’s research capacity to deliver our strategic plan BU2025.
This process was an interesting stock-take exercise and offered an opportunity to reflect on our successes. Our friends and associates will be aware of some of our work through our collaborations, joint publications, posts on BU’s award-winning Research Blog as well as our newsletter three times a year. The phrase commonly heard on the television programme Love Island, “You’re my type on paper”, reflects the notion here that a description on paper never quite reflects reality. The same goes for the research centre description of CMMPH, on a structured application form some of the subtle success can be overlooked. First of all, being a research centre is the main function of CMMPH, but certainly not the only one.
CMMPH is much more a university centre in the sense of FUSION, bringing together and creating a synergetic effect between research, Education and Practice. This FUSION enables research to be meaningful and has the ability to impact on the student experience through education as well as ‘real life’ issues and challenges in midwifery practice. This notion of being more than a research centre is reflected in our newsletters which always have sections on Research, Education and Practice.
To highlight this synergetic effect of being a properly fused centre, CMMPH has built a reputation for developing innovative student-led clinics: i) Student Midwife integrated Learning Environment (SMiLE) postnatal clinic in collaboration with Portsmouth NHS Trust; and ii) Newborn infant feeding clinic, in collaboration with the AECC University College. These clinics are underpinned by a growing body of evidence (=Research) from studies undertaken within CMMPH, which identifies their effectiveness in terms of a unique learning environment (=Education) to offer women better maternity care (=Practice). Both student-led clinics are being evaluated by PhD students at BU, one being match-funded with Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust and the other a self-funded chiropractic student.
On a different note, in the past four years our academics have been involved in organising five international conferences. CMMPH held two, high profile, international conferences focusing on research in midwifery education (2015, 2018); it organised the BNAC (British-Nepal Academic Council) conference at Bournemouth University in April 2017 (https://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/2017/03/24/nepal-conference-at-bu/ and CMMPH staff co-organised a conference in India on Mixed-Methods Research at the Mahatma Gandhi University (2019), and an education conference in Nepal (2018). Prof. Steve Tee, FHSS Executive Dean and National Teaching Fellow, gave a key note speech at the 2018 International Conference on ‘Challenges and Prospects of Quality Education in Nepal in Federalism Era in Nepal’.
CMMPH was on the BU Research Blog this week celebrating its latest media and midwifery publication (to see click here!). This paper is paper of a growing body of interdisciplinary research at BU across faculties and across the UK (see photo left). In addition last month Dr. Chris Chapleo from the Faculty of Management submitted a grant application to the ESRC under the title ‘Rebranding childbirth: understanding the role of marketing in influencing uptake of health services’, a joint application with CMMPH staff (Hundley & van Teijlingen) and Dr. Ann Luce in the Faculty of Media & Communication.
CMMPH is internationally recognised for its midwifery and maternity care research, education and publications. It has strong international links which includes active partnership agreements (MoA) with the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences (MMIHS) in Nepal and University of Texas Health Science Centre, School of Nursing in the USA.
Did I mention that CMMPH academics sit on the editorial boards of (or are editors of) all top four world-leading midwifery research journals: Birth, Midwifery, Women and Birth and BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth. Not only is this unique in the UK, as no other midwifery research group can claim this, it is also unique at BU as no other research centre can claim this kind of global coverage! And, last but not least CMMPH staff can claim to have written the eighth most quoted article in the international journal Midwifery (out if 2,626 published papers over the past 35 years).
All in all, on paper, 100% a centre to be proud of.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH
This week Evidence-Based Midwifery published the latest article from the BU team working on the portrayal of midwifery and maternity in the media. This qualitative paper ‘Changing the narrative around childbirth: whose responsibility is it?’ is co-authored by a multidisciplinary team including the disciplines of Midwifery, Sociology and Media.[1] The lead author is Prof. Vanora Hundley in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH), one of longest established centres at BU, her co-authors are Dr. Ann Luce in the Faculty of Media & Communication, Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen director of CMMPH and Sophie Edlund, who was based at BU at the time of the research but who is now at Malmö University in Sweden.
The paper addresses societal’s interest in all aspects of childbirth, which is reflected in both social and traditional media. Stories often focus on dramatic, risky and mostly unrealistic events; misrepresenting childbirth and maternity care professionals. The authors raised the question: “Whose responsibility is it to ensure accurate representations of childbirth?” Using semi-structured in-depth interviews with ten midwives working in the UK some working in the NHS, some in Higher Education or independent practice, the authors distilled four separate but inter-related themes:
(1) not my responsibility;
(2) fear of retribution;
(3) power balance; and
(4) social media.
The themes sat within two wider societal issues that reflect the current challenges for midwifery, these were (a) the ongoing battle between the social and the medical models of childbirth and (b) the impact of gender. Finding that midwives fear the media resonates with experiences from a number of countries and professional groups. There is a need to change media discourse in both fictional and factual representations of childbirth and midwives have a critical role to play in this, but to do this they need to equip themselves with the skills necessary to engage with the media. Guidelines on responsible media reporting could ensure that media producers portray pregnancy, midwifery and maternity care as naturally as possible.
This paper is paper of a growing body of interdisciplinary research at BU across faculties, which had already resulted in six earlier publications. [2-7] In addition last month Dr Chapleo from the Faculty of Management submitted a grant application to the ESRC under the title ‘Rebranding childbirth: understanding the role of marketing in influencing uptake of health services’, a joint application with CMMPH staff (Profs. Hundley & van Teijlingen) and the Media School (Dr. Luce).
References:
The photo of the week series is a weekly series featuring photos taken by our academics and students for our Research Photography Competition, which provides a snapshot of some of the incredible research undertaken across the BU community.
This week’s photo of the week is by Madison Miller, a student from the Faculty of Media and Communications.
Binaural beats aren’t a subject well known, though they are commonly used in different forms of meditation music. The word ‘beat’ may help tip you off that binaural beats are involved with music, but their unpleasant sound would say otherwise. Because of this divide, my research goes to explore exactly what binaural beats are through a philosophical point of view. Here, my research compares and unifies the scientific (or functional) and spiritual (or aesthetic) elements of binaural beats to conclude: binaural beats are a form of art. This form of art rests as music, since binaural beats allow for an aesthetic response from the listener, even if it’s a negative response.
In order to communicate these findings, I paired binaural beat instrumentation to nature photography (as nature is often used for visualisation meditation and even added to meditation music). The goal of pairing the nature photography to the binaural beats was to show that music (non-visual art) provides aesthetic responses much like photography (visual art). Likewise, though binaural beats are awful to listen to on their own, when paired with other instruments, or overlaid with other sounds, the aesthetic response can change, much like individual perceptions of interpreting photography.
A few times a month ResearchGate alerts me that another paper has reached a miles stone of so having been read some many times. Today the ResearchGate message is about 600 reads for our paper ‘Research Methods Coverage in Medical and Health Science Curricula in Nepal’. [1] This paper was a report on research methods teaching in health-related Higher Education (HE) courses in the health and medical field in Nepal. This paper originates from a DelPHE (Round 4), British Council award. Our study ‘Partnership on Improving Access to Research Literature for HE Institutions in Nepal’ (PARI Initiative) was a collaboration between the oldest university in Nepal, namely Tribhuvan University and two UK university of which BU was one. A further paper from the PARI Initiative was published a year later. [2] The lead author of both papers in BU Visiting Faculty Prof Padam Simkhada, who is Professor of International Public Health at the Public Health Institute at Liverpool John Moores University.
The Nepal Journal of Epidemiology is a full Open Access journal which means anybody across the globe can access it for free. The Nepal Journal of Epidemiology is part of Nepal Journals Online (NepJOL) a service established by INASP in 2007, which provides online publication of Nepali journals.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
References:
The department of Psychology with Parent Guidance Workshop is hosting an event: Pupils and Technology Workshop on Monday July 15th 2019 at 8:00 to 11:30 a.m. We are looking for Primary, Secondary, and Sixthform/College teachers to take part in this event. Please share this event with those who may be interested, event information below:
We understand the growing problem of technology in the classroom; our current projects aim to support children and the way they are using technology. We want to know your experiences as teachers, and how we can develop research to meet these needs.
Come along to this workshop to find out:
The morning will include:
Breakfast on arrival and refreshments will be provided
If you have questions please contact us on:
cpanourgia@bournemouth.ac.uk
Bournemouth University Charity Impact Fund is a fantastic way to facilitate engagement with charitable organisations if one wishes to increase the impact of our research as well as collaboration opportunities for our students. In my case, I will be organising the first ever Dorchester Science Festival during National Science Week 2020 with the aim of strengthening BU’s relationship with Dorset charities, and to reach out to the local community. Partners involved are the Dorset County Museum, Dorchester Arts, the Jurassic Coast Trust, The Institute of Physics, and the Thomas Hardye School Academy. Dorchester Town Council (although not a charity) is also a key partner to gain access to local venues. The longer-term ambition is to use this event as the basis for a Bournemouth Science Festival, an event that has never taken place. The date for the Dorchester Science Festival has now been fixed for Saturday 14th March 2020. You are all invited!
If you would like further information please contact Genoveva F. Esteban gesteban@bournemouth.ac.uk