By Brian Mathews. Last summer I posted about our aspirational identity project. We started with a long list of words and explored many concepts. We wrapped that up just before winter break and officially launched yesterday. More...

By Robert Talbert. As many Casting Out Nines readers know, last semester I undertook to rethink the freshman calculus 1 course here at my institution by converting it to an inverted or “flipped” class model. It’s been two months since the end of that semester, and this blog post is the first in a (lengthy)  series that I’ll be rolling out in the coming weeks that lays out how the course was designed, what happened, and how it all turned out.
Let me begin this series with a story about why I even bother with the flipped classroom. More...

By Robert Talbert. The picture you see here is my afternoon mail today. It consists of two copies of a new Calculus text (hardcover), two copies of another Calculus text (hardcover), and one copy of an intermediate algebra text (softcover). I did not request a single one of these. I certainly did not request duplicates of two of them. The last time I taught intermediate algebra was the mid-1990′s. I am not on a committee that selects textbooks. I have no use for these books other than to prop open a door. So why did I get them? I have no idea. More...

By Grace I. Liu and John M. Fitzgerald. America’s system for training lawyers is in crisis. Law students pay exorbitant prices for an education that does not prepare them to actually practice law. The legal degree, a J.D., is a professional degree. When did a professional education system become so divorced from the profession it supports?
As meticulously detailed in a report last year by a special committee of the Illinois State Bar Association, the “inadequate ‘practice ready’ skills of new graduates” have apparently contributed to “the reality that only 55 percent of the law school class of 2011 had full time, permanent jobs that required a J.D. nine months after graduation.” More...

By Julie Schumacher. From August 2013 to January 2014, I—a humble, workaday professor of English and creative writing at the University of Minnesota—received more than 1,600 letters of recommendation. In August, I vetted 56 applications for an administrative position in creative writing, each dutifully accompanied by three reference letters. More...

By Adeline Koh. At ProfHacker, we’ve written a lot about using Twitter in the classroom. Mark has written a framework for teaching with Twitter; Ryan about disposable Twitter accounts for classroom use; Erin on choosing hashtags. I’ve used Twitter in the classroom for some pretty successful assignments; particularly in the case of live tweeting films (see one of my previous assignments here). Unlike the typical passive viewing sessions, live tweeting allows instructors to directly engage in the student’s learning, by directing attention to issues that they might otherwise miss. More...

By George Williams. I suspect we’ve all been on the receiving end of poorly-designed documents: pages drowning in enormous gray oceans of text with no navigational cues whatsoever; emphasis indicated by text that is bold, all-caps, italicized, and underlined*; color choices that threaten to damage retinas (or that make text practically unreadable); text so small and margins so narrow that it’s obvious the desire to save paper has trumped the desire for clear communication. More...

By Anastasia Salter. This semester marks a first for me in teaching: a fully online course. While every course I teach is hybrid to a greater or lesser extent, I’ve always relied on in-class discussions and activities as an anchor. The course is a graduate seminar on Information Culture, so it definitely lends itself to meta-reflection on the very nature of doing this type of work online. It’s also synchronous, so we’ll be using video chat (Adeline just suggested lots of possible systems, I’ll be using GoToMeeting) to keep some of the immediacy of the classroom online. It’s my first time teaching the course, so I have no “physical” version in mind to compare it to, which has actually been helpful as I’ve been thinking about every assignment as virtual-first. More...

By Brock Read. By now you might have happened upon a few articles from Vitae, The Chronicle‘s newish academic career hub. If not, a brief introduction: In addition to job-search, dossier-management, and networking tools, we also post daily news and career advice—-much of it tackling matters of teaching, research, career development, and personal productivity. More...