University website rankings, Dalai Lama controversy

In 2007 Bush presented the Congressional Gold Medal to The Dalai Lama. (White house photo, Wikimedia Commons)

What will weigh more in the long run for a university’s reputation, the rhetoric of university rankings via such things as website hits, or the Chinese sanctioning of a university that awards the Dalai Lama an honorary degree?

Popular vote by clicking a mouse, or government sanctions?

Take, for example, The University of Calgary — There’s an interesting contrast in their status in two university news stories today.

One story is about the Dalai Lama honorary degree controversy.

Screenshot of top 10 Canadian universities' webistes, according to www.4icu.org

The other is a story in which we can see the university’s reputation measured by the popularity of its website.

They are both stories about a university’s ethos and how much it weighs politically and economically.

But these big news stories and ranking systems filter down to the level of individuals using rhetoric online, authoring online content  for educational purposes.  I conclude with some thoughts on how my own and others’ instructional website authoring may contribute to reputational rankings and international visibility.

I’ve divided this into 3 Separate posts:   Dalai Lama Controversy, University Website Rankings,  and University Website Rankings and Course Sites

 

University website rankings and course sites

Coms 463 Google Site course homepage clip, T. Smith, 2010

The trend toward ranking university websites, outlined in my previous post,  has implications for course websites and online curriculum.  How does an instructor’s posting of course content on the university’s web  server contribute to these rankings?

Is the public posting of course websites going to be encouraged as rank-boosting activity?  Course information on the main university server is likely to get a lot of hits from its captive audience of students.

However, do universities trust their professors to post content that might be visually or verbally inconsistent with their organizational ethos?

 

University website rankings

Screenshot of top 10 Canadian universities' webistes, according to www.4icu.org

University World news, Feb. 8th, 2010, has an article by Geoff Maslen,  Ranking universities by web popularity, which profiles how universities are being ranked by their website hits.

The University of Calgary, yes, the university that was snubbed by China, is #10 in Canada, #78 in North America and #168 in the World when ranked by hits to the website by www.4icu.org (4 International Colleges & Universities).

What is the economic and political influence of a university’s website and rankings?  Does its website’s attention and ranking offset in any way the potential economic loss and controversy caused by the awarding of an honorary degree to the Dalai Lama?

 

Dalai Lama Controversy

In 2007 Bush presented the Congressional Gold Medal to The Dalai Lama. (White house photo, Wikimedia Commons)

In the Feb. 8, 2010 edition of University World News, the site mentions the University of Calgary has been punished for awarding the Dalai Lama an honorary degree when he visited Calgary Sept. 29-Oct 1, 2009.

The Calgary Herald reported on Feb 4, 2010 (Gwendolyn Richards) that the university discovered late last year, after the Dalai Lama’s visit, that “The Chinese government has removed the University of Calgary from its list of accredited institutions.”

 

A Technical Writer Talks about the Relevance of Rhetoric

"Stairway to heaven," Paris - by Dmitry A. Mottl, June 2007. From Wikimedia Commons.

By guest columnist:

Andy Kubrin

Staff Technical Writer

Wind River Systems

andy.kubrin@windriver.com

A popular view of academia is that it is sheltered from the rough-and-tumble of everyday life. Leaving aside the question of whether this view has merit — and my beleaguered friends in the academy assure me that it does not — university students contemplating their future careers might still ask themselves how relevant their studies are to the conditions and vocational demands of the workplace.

For students of rhetoric, this question is especially pointed.

Rhetoric is, after all, a liberal art, with an elaborate body of theory but few, if any, marketable skills. How relevant is it to the 21st century workplace?