avril 2013

By Jason B. Jones. This week, the Modern Languages Association‘s Committee on Information Technology released updates to two 2000-era guidelines that will interest many ProfHacker readers: one on authoring digital resources, and another on how institutions might support humanities IT work. The “Guidelines for Authors of Digital Resources” does not try to explain how to markup a web page, or code a mobile app. Instead, it aims to “help authors create resources that can be easily discovered and used, fairly evaluated, and adequately cited.” It reminds authors about important issues such as accessibility, privacy, and security, while also providing guidance about giving credit, providing for fair use, types of metadata to include, and more. The “Guidelines for Information Technology Access and Support for the Modern Languages” has suggestions about three related, yet distinct areas: what resources are appropriate for scholars and teachers in the modern languages, and how to govern those resources. Read more...

The following is a guest post from Mandy Reinig, director of international education at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. A debate was started recently about whether social media has hurt study abroad, in part prompted by a commentary in The Chronicle. While I agree that technology has changed the way we look at study abroad and the way students interact while overseas, I don’t agree that it will lead to fewer cultural or transformative experiences for students while abroad. Social media has changed the way students interact and the way we, as international-education professionals, interact with students before, during, and after their time abroad. What I don’t think social media has done or will do is prevent those students who want a cultural experience from achieving it.  As was mentioned in some of the comments following the commentary, there have been and always will be students who treat study abroad as more of a vacation and go abroad simply to travel rather than for the academic or cultural experiences. Read more...

By Jeffrey R. Young. Starting in June, colleges that want to deliver their own massive open online courses will be able to use a free software platform developed jointly by Stanford University and edX, the nonprofit MOOC provider founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The move is a merger of sorts between two previously competing software-development projects with the same goal. EdX has long said it would make the software it built to power its MOOCs freely available to anyone as an open-source package. And Stanford was working on Class2Go, its own free software for online courses. Now the two software teams will work together and focus on developing a single platform. Read more...

By Karen Head. Because I grew up in a military family, the expression “boots on the ground” always informs how I look at the planning and execution of a project. No matter the situation, I believe an accurate assessment of resources and personnel is paramount to success. Like many instructors who have agreed to teach MOOCs (I’m currently working with colleagues to develop a massive open online course in freshman composition at Georgia Tech), I was eager to explore the possibilities. But in recent weeks I’ve begun to feel naïve, and even at times misled, about the necessary resources and procedures. In defense of all the universities who have signed on to create MOOCs, I don’t think any institution was, or could be, fully ready for the endeavor. There are too many unknowns. As a colleague of mine recently said, “We can’t build the track fast enough for this train to run on.” And this is where eagerness and naïveté really caught up with me—I signed on to this project assuming that the track was already there. It wasn’t, and that has meant a series of disruptions. Read more...

By Nick DeSantis. An internal investigation at the Citadel that examined how the South Carolina military college handled a sexual-abuse complaint was “inadequate” but did not represent a coverup to keep the information secret. That was the central finding of an independent review released by the institution on Friday, according to The Post and Courier, a South Carolina newspaper. The college’s investigation stemmed from a 2007 allegation that accused a former cadet of sexually abusing boys while he served as a counselor at the Citadel’s summer camp. The incidents of abuse reportedly took place five years earlier, in 2002. The former cadet, a Citadel graduate, is now serving a 50-year prison term after pleading guilty last summer to charges that he had molested boys in Charleston, S.C., the newspaper reported. The college has previously said that it regretted not doing more about the incidents, which prompted lawsuits against the institution. Read more...

By Tom Bartlett. Colin Purrington wrote a funny, helpful guide about designing scientific posters. It has loads of practical tips (don’t make it too long, use a nonserif font for titles, etc.) and jokes about the mating habits of cute red pandas. The guide has been remarkably popular—he estimates it’s been viewed about two million times over the years—and he gets e-mails thanking him all the time. It has become a claim to minor fame. Sometimes people, um, borrow his guide without giving him credit. This happens fairly regularly, and when he finds out about it, he sends an e-mail asking them to take it down. Usually they do. But when he sent an e-mail to the Consortium for Plant Biotechnology Research, asking that a roughly 1,200-word, near-verbatim, uncredited chunk from his guide be removed from the consortium’s materials, the response was unexpected. Read more...