My new book on a history of education in County Wicklow is published this week. It’s a great present for your history loving friends, múinteoirs of all ages, and the person who has everything. The book blurb is below, and you can see the Table of Contents and the Index, and order the book at this website. Education in Wicklow: From Parish Schools to National Schools ISBN: 978-0-9928233-0-6 In 1825, every school in the country was documented by a Parliamentary Inquiry. This showed that while the hedge school was still the main provider of education, there were a significant number of…
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How To Disagree
Sometime last year, a comment was left on one of my articles which said that I was being simplistic and my argument was childish. It was the first and only nasty comment I got, and it took me by surprise. After the sting, what I wanted to know was why he thought my argument was childish, so that I could consider something in my argument that I hadn’t before. I even wrote to him (oh, naiveté) but the email response just reiterated the main point rather forcefully. The net result was that neither of us really got anything from the…
Under the shadow of Section 37
The saddest thing about watching the David Norris interview released by RTÉ Archives this week is that while it was broadcast before I was born, it took until I became an adult for what he was campaigning for to become a reality. The simple acknowledgement that two people may love and live with each other, regardless of gender was a criminal act until 1993. I look to those generations before me and wonder how and why they were so complicit. Why did no-one say stop? Of course even Norris acknowedged in that interview that the actual punishments for homosexual activity…
Thank You, Iona Institute #TeamPanti
When Ireland first started to tackle the issue of immigration two decades ago, there were regular letters to the editor of the Irish Times from “The Immigration Control Platform”, which were an advocacy group against immigration. Their message was simple: you can be whatever race you want, just not in Ireland. It was never clear who or what ICP was beyond Áine Ni Chonaill, its public relations officer, and to be honest, you couldn’t help feel that it was a fairly small platform that probably fitted easily into a corner of Áine’s front room. But she was from “somewhere”. Irish…
Removing Religious Instruction from Schools
It wasn’t meant to be this way. When the National School system was formed in 1831, the rules stated that while the bible could be read in class, no comment was allowed in class time. Any comment from Protestant or Roman Catholic doctrine was to be conducted out of formal class time, in Sunday classes, or at Mass each Sunday. The system itself inherited the principles of the Kildare Place Society, formed in 1811, which advocated secular education, with comment on the bible the job of the clergyman, not the school master. Henry Grattan wrote in 1811: I should recommend…
Letter of Complaint to the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland
I have written to the BAI and urge you to do so too. To the members of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, I wish to lodge a complaint over the recent apology provided by RTÉ and subsequent compensation paid to Iona Institute and other named individuals, broadcast on The Saturday Night Show this month. The context of the apology is well documented. However, the ramifications are unclear. In the coming year, RTÉ will be required to provide an important public service as it broadcasts discussions from all sides in the forthcoming referendum on gay marriage. RTÉ has a duty…
Research output of Irish Institutions 1980-2009
I thought it would be interesting to compare some Irish institutions by examining their research output over the last three decades. This is first measured by number of publications, and then by considering the relevance of these citations to the community. Number of Publications In the decade 1980 – 1989, DCU and UL were the NIHE Dublin and Limerick respectively. DIT was formed as an entity in 1992. In the first decade, NIHE Dublin’s total number of publications was 232. After formation of DCU, the following decade, this increased to 1331, and in the decade 2000-2009, this increased hugely, to…
Technological University “Discussion”
In the week when Minister for Education Ruairi Quinn brought the Technological Universities Bill to cabinet, there was more than some disquiet from the commenterati that make up the usual pathetic discussion on higher education in Ireland. I don’t have any particular leaning for or against TU status for DIT. I think what we do, we do well, and we are one of the institutions in Ireland that genuinely differ from others in the type of graduates from our courses. Different doesn’t mean better or worse, it just means different. And in my own area at least, employers appear to…
LGBT Students Perceptions of Campus Life
Journal Club #7: S. J. Ellis, Diversity and inclusivity at university: a survey of the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) students in the UK, Higher Education, 2009, 57, 723 – 739. A recent conversation led me on the trail of looking to see what literature exists on issues around transition from school to college for LGBT students. The answer, briefly, is very little. Most studies on LGBT issues in college are based in the US, and most of these appear to be relate to staff rather than students. One paper that came close is this one, examining…
LiveScribe Pen Review: Don’t
Update: See comments below I recently bought a Livescribe pen with the aim of creating “Pencasts” – videos of pen writings aimed at online tutorials for demonstrating calculations, annotating diagrams etc – effectively screencasts on the fly. Unfortunately, someone who makes decisions in Livescribe has decreed that the pencast (the video and audio) output will be a proprietary format. After recording pencast, they can be exported to a PDF (final visual only), or uploaded to a space on the Livescribe website. I wanted to be able to export the pencast raw file to Camtasia to do a bit of post-production,…