Lecturers are considered more as facilitators rather than teachers.
And it's important to realize that they won't always be there to hold your
hand and to teach you, that a lot of that honors actually falls on yourself.
And that's very, very important.
[MUSIC]
>> So central to academic culture is critical thinking.
Now critical thinking isn't like being critical of people
as we have in the rest of our lives.
It's not about pulling people apart and being nasty to them.
Critical thinking is about taking an idea, not a person, an idea, and analyzing it.
Taking your current set of knowledge, your current set of ideas that you have, and
try to investigate whether that idea makes sense, and whether you can approve it.
Can we improve it, can we discover new knowledge?
[MUSIC]
>> Core values and expectations of academic culture,
I would say probably number one would be inquiry, would be the sense we're
trying to find things out, we're trying to discover new knowledge.
That's what we do research for,
we trying to find out new facts, that's probably the central one.
Another one that's really crucial is clarity
of expression in communicating those facts.
So we find out things through our research,
and a major thing of what we do in academic culture is communicate them.
So we need to be able to communicate them with clarity, whether we're teaching or
whether we're talking with the public or talking to people about what we do.
And then I think a third thing would be that we need to be able
to apply that knowledge, and part of the culture is to think about ways to do that.
Think about ways to not just communicate things, but
figure out ways in which we can take our findings and improve things,
improve the world, lead to new discoveries, build on what we've done.
[MUSIC]
>> So assessment at university is not quite like in other places,
because it's all about ideas.
Is not just going to be about memorizing facts,
it can be just about learning what's in your lecture or
learning what's in a book, it's going to be about thinking about that idea,
thinking about those facts, and taking them somewhere new.
And so don't expect to able to memorize things,
you really got to able to talk about it from your point of view, and and
express your thoughts on what the question is asking.
[MUSIC]
>> And finally, I'd mention a responsibility for
ethical and positive contribution.
We need to use our knowledge in ways that are ethical, and
make a positive contribution to the communities to which we belong,
whether they're local, regional, or global.