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13 octobre 2013

Weekend Reading: Nobel Laureate Edition

http://chronicle.com/img/photos/biz/profhacker-45.pngBy Erin E. Templeton. This week saw the announcement of several of the 2013 Nobel Laureates: François Englert and Peter W. Higgs for Physics; Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel for Chemistry; James E. Rothman, Randy W. Schekman and Thomas C. Südhof for medicine, and Alice Munro for literature. Munro’s win is particularly significant: she is the first Canadian author to win the prize. Here is The New York Times on Munro’s award. Also, over at Salon, Daniel D’Addario has given us “8 things to know about Nobel Laureate Alice Munro.” While the outgoing President of the University of Michigan herself has not recieved a prize(yet), she left a fine gift for current and future Michigan students. The Chronicle reported earlier this week that Mary Sue Coleman and her husband Kenneth M. Cleman were gifting $1 million to support study abroad scholarships. More...

13 octobre 2013

Are Closed Book Exams Still Relevant?

http://chronicle.com/img/photos/biz/profhacker-45.pngBy Adeline Koh. Knowledge is changing. In the world of print knowledge, internalized knowledge of facts once signaled expertise. But in the age of smartphones, Google and Wikipedia, this knowledge is now at our fingertips. How important, then, is it for our students to have this knowledge memorized?
Does this change our notion of what constitutes “learning”? Are closed-book exams, the mainstay of print knowledge, still useful? Professionals rarely have to undertake closed book exams in real life. Lawyers conduct research for cases. Programmers google code. More...

13 octobre 2013

In the Developing World, a Renaissance in Christian Higher Education

http://chronicle.com/img/photos/biz/icons/worldwise-nameplate.gifBy Rick Ostrander. My plane touches down just before midnight at Entebbe airport, by the shores of Lake Victoria, on a warm humid evening in East Africa. I walk through a drab, tired-looking terminal and out to a waiting vehicle in a dimly lit parking lot. I have arrived in Kampala, Uganda, for a four-day visit to Uganda Christian University and a front-row seat to a global revolution in higher education.
As the economies of the developing world have grown, they have created a nearly insatiable demand for higher education, especially in the Global South. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, the number of university students has risen from 800,000 in 1985 to three million in 2002. A significant footnote to this growth has been the rapid expansion of Christian higher education in the developing world. Of the nearly 600 Christian universities outside the United States and Canada, 30 percent were started since 1980. Since 1990, 138 new Christian universities have been started, 46 of them in Africa. Read more...
13 octobre 2013

Is the Internet Good for Writing? Part 2: Negative

http://chronicle.com/img/photos/biz/icons/lingua-franca-nameplate.pngBy Ben Yagoda. Last week we took a look at Clive Thompson’s claim that the Internet has brought about a Golden Age of prose. The novelist Jonathan Franzen would beg to differ. He recently published an essay in The Guardian, on the early-20th-century Austrian satirist and editor Karl Kraus, that included some swipes at the Internet’s catastrophic effect on writing. (Getting him on the subject was that Kraus didn’t care for the technology of his day.) Franzen notes his “disappointment when a novelist who I believe ought to have known better, Salman Rushdie, succumbs to Twitter” and when, in a “celebration” of the online literary cosmos, the magazine N+1 “somehow neglects to consider the Internet’s accelerating pauperization of freelance writers.” Read more...
13 octobre 2013

Word of the Year? Obamacare!

http://chronicle.com/img/photos/biz/icons/lingua-franca-nameplate.pngBy Allan Metcalf. As the year descends into the dark days ahead, it’s not too early to take a first look back at the language we have used in 2013 in order to find a Word of the Year. That’s the designation, not always an honor, applied to a word or phrase selected from the verbiage of the year by the American Dialect Society. Read more...
13 octobre 2013

‘The Guardian’ Opposes Zombie Rules

http://chronicle.com/img/photos/biz/icons/lingua-franca-nameplate.pngBy Geoffrey Pullum. Most of what gets said about grammar in the British press is a ludicrous jumble of hoary myths and self-evident nonsense. (Take this “grammar test” in The Telegraph, for example: It is so downright silly that the paper’s own assistant comment editor and science writer, Tom Chivers, took the unusual step of critiquing it online in a Telegraph blog.) So—and I’m sorry if this sounds patronizing—I was genuinely surprised to see a newspaper article about grammar making 10 points about the syntax of contemporary Standard English that are broadly correct. Read more...
13 octobre 2013

The Jargon Prize

http://chronicle.com/img/photos/biz/icons/lingua-franca-nameplate.pngBy Lucy Ferriss. The rumor that unsubscribing yourself from an unwanted e-mail list tends to regenerate your address in other unwanted e-mail blasts bears fruit, in my case, with electronic scatter-bombs from sites promoting educational administration and technology. I have never, for the record, had anything to do with either of these areas of expertise. But I receive regular communications titled “Collegiality from a Positive Leadership Perspective,” “iOS, Android and Mobile Development Tools in Ed Tech,” “Have a Firm Grip on Your Metrics Reviews,” and the like. Indeed, the more I unsubscribe, the more my junk mail in these areas grows. Read more...
13 octobre 2013

Old Hat (Warning: Adult Content!)

http://chronicle.com/img/photos/biz/icons/lingua-franca-nameplate.pngBy Anne Curzan. I recently reread the brilliant New Yorker piece by Jack Winter titled  “How I Met My Wife,” as I prepared for a short radio segment about negative words that don’t have positive counterparts. Winter plays with dozens of “missing” positive words in the short essay, from “shevelled,” “gruntled,” and “chalant” to “persona grata” and “sung hero.” Read more...
13 octobre 2013

Women in Science (or Not)

http://chronicle.com/img/photos/biz/the-conversation-logo1-45.pngBy Ann Adjie Shirley-Henderson. After a few drinks with male scientists at a bar, I was hit with the question, “So what do you babes in the sciences want?” The quick answer I gave, after suppressing an obscenity, had to do with creating a level playing field. But that’s not what I really want. I want retribution, remuneration, and recognition, right now. But I would settle for an even split between male and female scientists in all favorable factors for success, immediately. More...

13 octobre 2013

Library of Congress Web Sites Go Live Again

http://chronicle.com/img/photos/biz/icons/wired-campus-nameplate.gifBy Jennifer Howard. In a rare piece of good news this week out of Washington, D.C., the Library of Congress announced it had restored access to its Web sites. They had gone dark, along with many other federal agencies’ sites, because of the government shutdown. Many scholars and researchers rely on the library’s sites for access to its vast collections. Read more...

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