14 thoughts on “OUseless.info”

  1. I don’t know the people behind this decision, Tony, but they are cretins.

    Please don’t let this decision stop you doing your stuff here on the blog, or providing inspiration to all your readers and followers.

    You’ll always be providing useful info – and I demand you revert the name of this blog forthwith.

  3. Yes: cretins. Comiserations to you. Time to leave and become a highly paid consultant, thus depriving HE of an academic who contributes a great deal to HE *and* to society at large? Isn’t there a word for that? Oh yes, “IMPACT”. You have it in spades. They don’t.

    We still love you, even if they don’t.

  6. Promotion is always a strange thing in a university. And it is dumb that something that should be about recognizing excellent work can be so demotivating.

    You will get promoted if you choose to stay. I would bet that their “procedures” just cant keep up with the pace of what you are doing.

    But dont throw their feedback away – it should be clear where they felt you were short. So you can solve it.

    Of course ’till then you have the one thing they can’t touch: A reputation.

    Keep working on it I say.

    M

  7. Pingback: In For a Penny, In For a Pound… My Promotion “Case for Support” « OUseful.Info, the blog…

  10. Thanks, all, for the comments… I’ve haven’t see the feedback yet, but will post it (gulp!;-) when I do…

    A paper on scholarship recently went to OU Senate, so as soon as that becomes a public doc I’ll post it in a commentable form and add my own commentary to it.

    Martin has also written some more thoughts on the recognition of new forms of scholarship at http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/2010/10/tenure-publishing-and-tony.html

  11. Crap news – really sorry to hear this.

    I (personally) had really high hopes for you here. If someone like yourself can’t seem to make progress using alternative research ‘vectors’ then what hope is there for any other new paradigm?

    Maybe need to wait for the post-mortem.

    Now, here’s the horrible thing – Edinburgh University are advertising a Lectureship in Design Informatics. Good job, good university, but you need the research background and what would really be different? Would it just me more of the same (but in a much nicer city ;) )? It’s not just the OU, it’s endemic.

    Did you listen to the whole of Ken Robinson’s RSA talk? He’s not suggesting a reform but a complete re-design (mad, wonderful daydreamer that he is).

    (PS – How is it possible to have an up to date published research portfolio in a subject that requires 24/7 knowledge anyway? Is this ironic, or does it really demand a new attitude and approach?)

    (PPS – At least when you type ‘Tony Hir’, google prediction pulls up a really bad picture of you under Images. not many people at the OU can do that…)

    1. @derek Thanks for the support – I suspect that my CV wouldn’t do me many favours if I tried to apply for a job in ac.uk – the formal marking scheme for applications would, I suspect, land my application on the reject pile…

      As for “tony hir” in Google, I did actually include a screen shot of that in my case for support. I like to think, though I have no evidence of it, that that action by itself had some impact in the form of the members of the promotion panel trying similar ego searches on their own names and the names of other colleagues they maybe thought of as influential… and when they got nowhere (maybe…;-), cast it off as “pah, well, it’s *only* Google…”… ;-) Heh heh…

  12. Late to this, and really sorry to hear it.

    Keep on munging. They’ll get it in the end.

    Mike

  13. Pingback: Whose university? why? pt 3 » FOLLOWERS OF THE APOCALYPSE

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