By Robert Talbert. Over three years ago, I wrote a post to try to address a fallacy that is used to refute the idea of novel ways of teaching mathematics and science. That fallacy basically says that mathematics and the way people learn it have not fundamentally changed in hundreds if not thousands of years, and therefore the methods of teaching  that have “worked” up to this point in history  don’t need changing. Or more colloquially, “We were able to put a man on the moon with the way we’ve taught math for hundreds of years, so we shouldn’t change it now.” I sometimes refer to this as the “man on the moon” fallacy because of that second interpretation. More...

By Amy Cavender. Among Google’s tools for getting work done, we here at ProfHacker have long been fans of Google Scholar. It’s a useful tool for finding good sources, it can be used to track citations to your work, and setting up an alert in Google Scholar is a great way to keep track of new publications on a topic. Google keeps developing the service, and a few weeks ago, they addd a new feature: Google Scholar Library. That blog entry and the service’s help page explain quite well how to use this new feature, so I won’t go into detail about that here. More...

By Brian Croxall. With the close of the semester, you’re probably doing what you can to get your email inbox under control now that some of your colleagues have left the campus and your students have finished their finals. Email is, of course, the gift that keeps on giving. So it’s perhaps appropriate as we approach the end of the year that I make a gift to you of a fabulous new (and free!) service I discovered that will radically reduce the number of emails you receive on a daily basis: Unroll.Me. More...

By Rob Jenkins. Lately my college, like many other two-year schools, has been making an effort to encourage students to stay for two years and earn an associate degree before transferring. That can be a hard sell, since we’re primarily a “portal” institution, and many of our students make no bones about the fact that they want to transfer as soon as possible—in many cases, after one year. Even those who stay two years often can’t be bothered to go to the extra “trouble” of applying for graduation, despite the clear advantages of having an actual degree to show for those two years. Perhaps, though, if the essay below is any indication, the word is starting to get through. This was actually a final exam essay in one of my ENGL 1101 sections this semester. The student wrote it in one hour (per departmental instruction), based on one of three prompts that I provided. More...

By Marion Lloyd. Michelle Bachelet, who won Chile’s presidency in a landslide on Sunday, has vowed to overhaul her country’s economic model to deal with endemic inequality. And she plans to start by providing free higher education for all. It’s a radical departure from the current system, in which the government accounts for just 15 percent of the sector’s total funding. That share is among the lowest in the world and is less than half that of the United States, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD. More...

By Anne Curzan. We’re nearing the end of the year, which has me thinking about the annual Word of the Year vote at the American Dialect Society meeting in January. We’ll be in Minneapolis this year, and Grant Barrett (Vice President of Communications and Technology for ADS) is soliciting nominations for a list of possible contenders. I asked students last week if they had suggestions, and they came up immediately with twerk, turnt, and insta (as a noun and verb, < Instagram). More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. For three-quarters of an hour one afternoon a week ago, the British House of Lords was entirely occupied with a discussion of pronoun grammar. The discussion had been requested by a former judge, Lord Scott of Foscote, and the impetus was a promise by the previous government that future laws would be framed in gender-neutral language, at least “so far as it is practicable, at no more than a reasonable cost to brevity or intelligibility.” Predictably, Lord Scott defended what The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language calls “purportedly sex-neutral he”: the old-fashioned notion that saying “anyone who thinks he deserves it” doesn’t exclude females. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. I don’t have Siri, and so my experience of Apple’s virtual personal assistant is limited to eavesdropping on my friends’ iPhones. But it has struck me as fascinating that the voice for several years was a woman’s, at least in this country. Despite the impression that a female avatar would be “less knowledgeable,” than a male, according to the Stanford researcher Clifford Nass, Apple’s initial roll-out was given a female voice because female voices are preferred in the “helper or assistant role.” The exception, at least at first, was in France and in Britain, where users apparently go for knowledge over subservience. But the female avatar is ubiquitous enough to have spawned at least one Hollywood movie, Spike Jonze’s new “neo-classic boy-meets-operating-system romance,” Her. More...

By Kathryn D. Blanchard. Recently I participated in one of the many Saturday admissions events hosted by my small college each year. This particular event was a kind of “department fair,” involving a large lobby full of tables, well-dressed admissions officers, and not-so-well-dressed faculty members. All of us were there to greet the 60 or so high-school students, together with their families, who had come to visit the college and speak with faculty members in their projected majors. More...

By Steve Kolowich. Massive open online courses could help increase access to higher education while driving down its costs, but President Obama should not intervene in order to push the MOOC movement in that direction. That’s the advice the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology has offered the president in a letter, made public on Wednesday, that focuses on education technology—and MOOCs in particular. More...