By Brian Mathews. We’re still in the early stages of reshaping the role of our library but I wanted to share a document that outlines some of our thinking. Julie Speer, Tyler Walters, and I co-wrote a paper for the International Association of Technological University Libraries (IATUL) Conference. Read more...
By Brian Mathews. I see that Florida approved an online-only public university and that California is exploring faculty-free colleges that would award exam-based degrees. Combine this with the fact that the federal government is exploring different models for financial aid based on competency rather than the quantity of credit hours. And add in that accreditation bodies are warming up to more open learning models. Read more...
By Nigel Thrift. University campuses are increasingly becoming beacons for public values, contrary to the many critics who seem to believe that the Dark Ages are upon us in higher education. There are many different campuses that are leading society to a better place by setting an example themselves. In the past, they were on the forefront of battles over gender and racial equality. But the story doesn’t end there. I see progress recently in four other important areas: gun control, sustainability, community outreach, and global health. In the United States, the most recent instance is the campaign by many college and university presidents to take on the gun lobby and reassert the need for gun-free campuses—against considerable pressure from state legislatures in some cases. Five states now permit the concealed carry of firearms at public institutions. As other state legislators introduce bills to allow concealed firearms on campuses, higher-education leaders are stepping into the fight to prevent the proposals from becoming law. Read more...
By Geoffrey Pullum. “Slang creates a lot of new nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs,” said Anne Curzan here on Lingua Franca recently; “it isn’t that often that slang creates a new conjunction.” She puts her finger on exactly the right point there. For English to add a new word is not news. But the classes of words that modern linguists call lexical categories (“parts of speech” was the quaint 18th-century term for them) are like clubs of varying selectivity. They all admit new members from time to time, but while Noun is the least discriminating (very much the club that you wouldn’t want to belong to given that it would take just anybody), the most exclusive one, with the slowest growth, is probably the one traditionally called “conjunction”—the category of words like and, or, and but. Read more..By Allan Metcalf. One left, two left — Excuse me, I was just talking with a guy from 6,000 years ago.By Anne Curzan. In the undergraduate history of English course I am teaching this term, I request/require that the students teach me two new slang words every day before I begin class. I learn some great words this way (e.g., hangry “cranky or angry due to feeling hungry”; adorkable “adorable in a dorky way”). More importantly, the activity reinforces for students a key message of the course: that the history of English is happening all around us (and that slang is humans’ linguistic creativity at work, not linguistic corruption). Read more...
By Susan Matt and Luke Fernandez. In 1937, as she lay ill in bed, Annie Oakes Huntington, a writer living in Maine, thought of ways to spend her time. She confided in a letter: “The radio has been a source of unfailing diversion this winter. I expect to enter all the courses at Harvard to be broadcasted.” Huntington was joining in an educational experiment sweeping the country in the 1920s and 30s: massive open on-air courses.
By T. Hugh Crawford. While I was hiking the Appalachian Trail this past summer, Georgia Tech, my home institution, announced its affiliation with Coursera and launched itself headlong into the MOOC world. It occurred to me as I ambled down the trail that day that an intensely embodied experience like long-distance hiking seemed the opposite of long-distance education. Hiking requires taking not only a careful equipment inventory but also a constant inventory of your own body: checking hydration, sore muscles, arthritic knees, blisters, and an always-too-heavy pack.By Scott Carlson. Just listen to Dimitrius Graham sing. His voice soars up and down the scale like a bird carried on the wind. As a music major at Morgan State University, he seems keenly aware of certain realities about his life: His talent is undeniable and probably innate, and his future is promising but uncertain. He could make a career singing on Broadway or climbing the charts as a Billboard phenomenon. Or he could spend years singing for church groups and community theaters, for little or no money.By Kevin Carey. College transcripts are horrible. I say this not as a columnist but as an employer. Whenever my nonprofit policy group advertises a position, we get hundreds of résumés. Every applicant is a college graduate. But when it comes to winnowing the field to 10 or 15 semifinalists, we have almost no useful information about what they learned in school. Their résumés tell us if they attended a selective institution, which provides some insight into what they were like at age 17. But we're not in the market for high-school juniors. Their major suggests a broad area of interest, but if they weren't interested in my field, they wouldn't be applying for the job in the first place. Read more.../https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
