The Research Assesment Exercise (RAE) is carried out across all UK universities every five to seven years. It is supposed to be a way of measuring the quality of research carried out in each university, in each department. It is supposed to be about quality assurance and universities are given points and put in a rank order and money is dished out according to how well (or not) you do.
What gets me is that although my department did well in the last RAE we are always told we have no spondoolix.
That aside.
The RAE drives everyone batty and we all have to have our work graded and assessed by our institutions before it is then passed on to the proper thing. We are currently preparing for the mock RAE. We have to also hand in a list of ‘markers of esteem’ about ourselves … e.g. offices held; prizes won, etc.
Funnily enough, meanwhile in the lovely jubbly cuddly online world, we are forever rank ordering and grading ourselves there. People give each other grades and comments on ebay such as ‘Great ebayer!!!! A +++++’ - you can get that just for paying for something. It is a marvellous confidence boost.The feedback comes quick and clear. On Flickr we have comments and numbers of views that we can happily tot up (see here the info under each image) and we even enter mad competitions.
In myspace you can notch up kudos by having loads of friends and people who come into yourspace on myspace; on blogs you might appear on other people’s blogrolls (esteem factor); or you may even get listed on blogger’s interesting blogs list.
And it is wondefful if you can get a photo into interestingness. What a reward. It gets the punters coming back everytime.
If you are really into the whole Flickr hing you can go to fd’s gadgets and find out how many of your photos are n the interestingness group at anytime. As I am feeling in a very self-disclosing mood, I will tell you I have the page bookmarked.
Today I am very excited as one of my photos seems to be getting a whole stream of popolos . Hopefully I will do well and will have to move my pic to popfabulous!!
And I made a new poster of my photos which are in interestingness ….which is here:
What I was wondering, is ‘Can I list this in my RAE esteem factors list?’
Will I get put in RAEfabulous?
And is it fun in RAE fabulous?
