Monthly Archives: November 2014

Now’s your chance to make a Big Green Impact!

Green Impact will soon be launching at the University of Kent, and this year it’ll be bigger and better than ever! Come to our Launch Event on Friday 21st November, 12-1.30pm in Eliot Hall, for a chance to sign up your team and take part in another fantastic year of exciting environmental enterprises.

Green Impact is a national accreditation scheme which rewards you for making a positive impact on the environment, and has been a huge success throughout departments at the University of Kent for the past few years. Whether you’re a keen green bean or don’t know anything about environmental issues, Green Impact is lots of fun and easy to be a part of. Just sign up your team to access the online workbook, meet criteria to achieve as many points as you can, and collect your Bronze, Silver or Gold award at the ceremony at the end of the year. From building a bee hotel to running an awareness day, there are lots of projects you can be involved in to help build a more sustainable future for your University.

Sign up now for our Launch Event to help us reach 50 teams for the University’s 50th Anniversary, and find out how Green Impact really has made an impact at Kent. Refreshments will be provided.

For more information, Laura Heintz would love to hear from you. E-mail L.Heintz@kent.ac.uk or phone 01277 82 3733.

BBC broadcaster Fi Glover to give alumni talk

BBC broadcaster Fi Glover will be visiting the University on Thursday 13 November, to talk about her career in radio, publishing and television, as part of the School of European Culture and Languages’ celebrations for Kent’s 50th anniversary. The event will be followed by a networking event for SECL students and alumni to meet each other.

Fi Glover is an alumna of both the Department of Classical & Archaeological Studies and the Department of Philosophy. She is one of this country’s best known radio voices, and was recently described in the Guardian as ‘gifted, multi award winning’ and ‘disproportionately likeable’. She won a Sony Gold Award and a Sony Silver Award for Saturday Live on BBC Radio 4, as well as a Sony Silver Award for Broadcasting House on Radio 4, a Bronze Award for the GLR Breakfast Show and has received 4 other nominations over the last 10 years. She has worked on Radio 4, Radio Five Live, Radio 2, Radio 1 and GLR, and is now presenting three shows for the network: a landmark three year documentary series for BBC Radio called Generations Apart, a discussion programme called Shared Experience and the Listening Project – a unique and ambitious sound archive being created by the BBC for the British Library.

Following her graduation, Fi cut her teeth on the BBC’s Trainee Reporter scheme in 1993, travelling the country working for local radio stations. She used some of those experiences in her book Travels With My Radio (Ebury Press, 2001). From 1997 to 1999 she also presented The Travel Show on BBC2, travelling to 36 countries in three years. Over the last 15 years in broadcasting Fi has also presented Rough Justice Live on Channel 4, The Technophobes Guide to the Future on BBC2, she has appeared on The Apprentice, Call My Bluff, Just a Minute, Have I Got News For You and Sport Relief Celebrity Bake-Off. Fi is on the board of Sound Women, the industry organisation promoting women’s rights within the industry and was Chair of Judges for the 2009 Orange Prize for Women’s Literature. She has written columns for the Guardian and Woman’s Weekly and currently writes for Waitrose Weekend.

Fi Glover’s talk will take place in the Gulbenkian Cinema. Doors open from 4pm followed by a drinks reception and a SECL Alumni Networking Event for students and alumni in the Colyer Fergusson Foyer from 5.30pm. Over 20 alumni from a diverse range of companies will be attending, to talk informally about their experiences since leaving the University and their careers.

Full details of the event can be found at www.kent.ac.uk/secl/events

Please email secl@kent.ac.uk to book a place on either Fi’s talk or the alumni networking event.

Writer Julian Baggini to give lecture at Kent

Julian Baggini, a humanist philosopher, will give a public lecture, titled ‘Feast or Fast? Religion, Food and the Good Life’, on behalf of the Department of Philosophy on Wednesday 19 November from 4-6pm in Cornwallis Maths Lecture Theatre 1.

Julian Baggini is a writer and the founding editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine. He has a PhD on the philosophy of personal identity and is the author of over 20 books including The Pig That Wants to be Eaten (Granta, 2010), The Virtues of the Table (Granta, 2014) and The Ego Trip (Granta, 2012).

He will discuss how religious traditions sometimes celebrate food and eating in feasts, but they also often promote abstinence, moderation and asceticism. St Francis of Assisi even mixed his food with ashes, or quench its flavour with cold water.

Is religion too austere in warning against the pleasures of the flesh or can we all learn – believers or not – from its food traditions?

Julian will argue that religion gets some things right and some things wrong about the pleasures and virtues of eating, and try to unpick the good from the bad.

Full details of this event are available at: www.kent.ac.uk/secl/events/.

Templeman Library is talk of RIBA

The Templeman Library development was featured in a Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) presentation by the project architects Penoyre and Prasad.

Associate Suzi Winstanley presented ‘ThinkSpace – Perspectives on Architecture’, a practice-led research project examing the new demands on reader space facing the contemporary university library, and proposing and modelling prototype design solutions.

The contemporary university library faces a number of challenges, including changing study patterns, shift away from print towards digital dissemination, and ongoing proliferation of power-hungry digital devices. Traditional library interior design and furnishings do not meet these emerging requirements.

Architects have designed bespoke solutions which can be effective but suffer from high costs, low levels of R&D, and lack of scalability. Consequently, there is a clear creative and commercial opportunity to rethink and redesign interior settings for the contemporary university library as a typology.

The research emerges out of, and runs in parallel to, the Library’s extension and refurbishment scheme.

For more information, contact Julia Crompton.

‘Ise – Japan’s Sacred City’ symposium on 18 Nov

On Tuesday 18 November the Centre for English and World Languages is hosting a symposium in Keynes College on the sacred Japanese city of Ise, as part of an academic and cultural visit to Kent by staff from Kogakkan University.

The symposium consists of four short lectures – three in Japanese with translation and one in English.

Kent staff are welcome to attend any of the four lectures as well as the lunch at 12.00.

  • 10.00: Session one – Jingu in Ise and Japanese Shinto: a cyclical civilization
  • 11.00: Session two – Modern Ise and the Jingu Shrine
  • 13.00: Session three – The Pilgrimage to Ise-Jingu in the Modern Era
  • 14.00: Session four – Japanese Tea Culture and the Shinto Religion

Places are limited so please register.

We will contact you to confirm in due course.

Invitation to Medway ‘Focus on Quality’

You are invited to attend the Medway Focus on Quality afternoon, on Wednesday 3 December at 1pm in Rochester R2:09. This event will be presented by Silvia Dobre, Head of Planning and Business Information and Malcolm Dixon, Quality Assurance manager, UELT.

The Focus on Quality session will provide a review the NSS results relevant to Medway staff. There will also be an update on the Higher Education Review planned for March. There will be time for questions and discussion.

All are welcome to attend. For more information and to register your place, see http://www.kent.ac.uk/teaching/networks/ltn/ or email cpdbookings@kent.ac.uk.

Further information on the Learning and Teaching Network is available at: http://www.kent.ac.uk/teaching/networks/ltn/index.html#medway-poster.

Judy Cohen | Curriculum Developer | UELT

Students at PC

Help a student learning your language

Is Russian, Arabic, Japanese or Mandarin your first language? If so do you have a free one to two hours each week to help a student learning your language? In return they may be able to help you with your English if you have never studied in the UK before, forming the basis of what we call Language Exchange.

To find out more please see our Moodle page.

If you would like to sign up as a ‘language buddy’ please follow the instructions and create a profile. Once completed you can search for a student learning your language and other students can also find you.

To support Language Exchange we will be hosting a social event on Tuesday 25 November from 17.00-19.00hrs in Keynes Senior Common Room.

If you would like to attend this please see the booking details listed on Moodle (please note, numbers will be restricted and will be on a first come first served basis).

If you have any questions please contact Amy Moses.