I love breakout rooms, but I think it’s partly because I have ADHD, so find it hard listening to a presenter for long, if there aren’t things for me to do. In a small breakout room we are turn taking so I have more stuff to do.

I did have to do a presentation to a small group of ECRs recently, and they mostly had their cameras off. I found it really hard. Is it a Gen Z thing? Are they all introverts?

Very true. And Nigel Farage has never said that to himself in his life.

Well, and also, Farage may have held more public offices than Polanski. But as he’s never turned up to work in any of them, I can’t see that he’ll have learned very much.

That’s so weird. Interacting with peers is surely the best bit of any workshop? Notwithstanding wonderful and entertaining presenters such as yourself, of course.
But peer interactions is where you test out and make sense of what you’ve been learning about.

Here’s an obituary of Greg Philo, leading light of GUMG, if you’d like to know more jacobin.com/2024/06/greg...

What they show, time and again, is that TV news (including, but not limited to, the BBC) is biased towards the interests of the powerful and the establishment.
But obviously that reality is nowhere reflected in current discussions.

The book is War and Peace News by Glasgow University Media Group.
GUMG also did groundbreaking work analysing tv news coverage of industrial relations, climate change, Israel/Palestine, etc.

Except of course that everything has gone a bit mad and rabid the last few years.
But fifty years ago everyone working at the BBC was an upper middle class white man who went to Oxbridge. So their idea of normal and unbiased was pretty skewed, without them seeing that.

This quote is from a book published in 1985, and I don’t think that things have changed fundamentally since then.

It just underlined in red “wouldnt”. But when I clicked on it, couldn’t suggest any improvements.

I don’t really want to be focusing on this - I’d rather spend my time helping home educators support their kids learning what goes *into* the GCSEs. But there’s no point doing that if they then can’t find a centre or can’t afford to sit the exams.

Exactly so.

Not a black and white answer, tbh. There are five main characters. None of whom are scientists. But one works in an essential but non-scientific capacity for a scientific project.
A sixth character (who IS a scientist) looms large in the narrative, but is ‘off screen’ for nearly all the book.

Benefits of home educating - my self-directed learner kid finds out all sorts of weird stuff I didn’t know, and tells it to me.

I’ve read the book, but I’m not sure what your question is?

Absolutely.

Holding boundaries is difficult. You have to practice it on the small stuff to ever be ready to do it on the big stuff. Unfortunately it doesn’t tend to get you promoted into senior positions in large bureaucracies.