By Lee Skallerup Bessette. I recently finished reading the new Jim Henson biography (which is excellent), and I was struck by how many projects Henson always had on the go. Once a project was finally coming together (like, finally getting The Muppet Show on the air), he was already planning, or perhaps rather, dreaming the next two or three ideas and started to divide his time and energy accordingly. It’s not that he stopped working on the previous project, but he was always thinking ahead, restless for what was coming next. It wasn’t out of ambition either, but just from a desire, he expressed, to “do good things.” Read more...10 novembre 2013
Moving Forward
By Lee Skallerup Bessette. I recently finished reading the new Jim Henson biography (which is excellent), and I was struck by how many projects Henson always had on the go. Once a project was finally coming together (like, finally getting The Muppet Show on the air), he was already planning, or perhaps rather, dreaming the next two or three ideas and started to divide his time and energy accordingly. It’s not that he stopped working on the previous project, but he was always thinking ahead, restless for what was coming next. It wasn’t out of ambition either, but just from a desire, he expressed, to “do good things.” Read more...Journalist or Professor?
By Lee Skallerup Bessette. I’ve written previously about how, before I wanted to be a professor, I wanted to be a journalist. I started writing press releases and copy for my swim team when I was 14 or 15 years old. Our high school didn’t have a newspaper, but there were opportunities for student writers to publish in the major English Montreal daily, The Gazette, which I took advantage of as much as I could. If I hadn’t been invested in swimming, I probably would have tried to start a newspaper, but for me, swimming was the way to get a scholarship and get a free education and out of the house. I continued in college (CEGEP) to write entertainment reviews for the paper there, and then in university ended up editing the English-language college newspaper. Read more...What He Said
By Tracy Mitrano. The Swedish Foreign Minister's letter to The New York Times this week could have been written before the Snowden disclosures, but surely it is the product of them. Spoken from a premise of Western individualism and democracy, it calls for International Internet Law in support of those principles. His specific seven-point plan is worth repeating here:
- First, surveillance should be based on laws, and these must be adopted in a transparent manner through a democratic process. The implementation of these laws should be reviewed periodically to ensure that the expansion of surveillance capabilities due to technological advances is properly debated. Read more...
Brazil, lost in the rankings
By Simon Schwartzman. The bad news: Earlier in October the Brazilian press announced the sad news that the University of São Paulo (USP) usually considered the best university south of Rio Grande, had disappeared from the top list of 200 institutions of the Times Higher Education rankings, together with the prestigious State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). USP went from the 158th place to join the 226-250 group, while UNICAMP disappeared from the top 300 list completely. During the following days, many articles appeared in newspapers, magazines and blogs, trying to explain this sudden fall. The fact that USP remained among the best 150 in the also prestigious ranking of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University was no consolation. Read more...
MOOC: Exploring the Student Affairs Profession
By Eric Stoller. Earlier this year, I asked whether or not Student Affairs needed a technology MOOC. The idea being that a technology MOOC for Student Affairs would be useful as a way to provide access to a baseline of technology-related content for Student Affairs practitioners (especially for folks who are in masters level higher education programs). It does seem like MOOCs would be useful platforms for those of us who work in (and study) higher education. At the very least, we would be using the very tools that many of us expect our students to use. Having direct fluency with MOOCs and online learning would be highly useful for all Student Affairs practitioners. Read more...As Interest Fades, So Does Common Sense
By Barbara Fister. A friend Tweeted a link to a New York Times “death of the humanities” piece recently. You may have read it. The title is “As Interest Fades in the Humanities, Colleges Worry.” It triggered in me a kind of autocomplete fugue state. I tweeted back a string of inanities.
- As interest fades in the public welfare, colleges pretend they care as they scramble to pay for the stadium and tuition rises.
- As interest in learning fades, colleges make sure they have climbing walls.
- As interest in scientific inquiry fades, colleges slip science into the premed curriculum and hope they'll get away with it.
- As interest in being premed fades, students scramble to choose other majors.
One inanity deserves another. Michael Bérubé pointed out last summer that the numbers don’t add up to a crisis in the humanities. Read more...
Math Geek Mom: Expressions of Thanks
By Rosemarie Emanuele. I recall one professor from graduate school who would often say that when he told people that he taught Economics for a living, the listener often reacted by being appalled. “That was the WORST class I ever took” they would often tell him, leaving him in a position of explaining why the class was really useful and actually very cool. As a math professor, I often encounter the same reaction (and sometimes doubly so, when the person learns that I am not just a math professor but also an Economist.) I found myself thinking of this recently when I ran into a former student as I made my way across the campus. Read more...
Are You Working With a Learning Designer?
By Joshua Kim. Are you working with a learning designer?
Have you consulted a learning design professional on your campus to help you think about:
- Leveraging learning technologies to assist you in meeting your teaching goals?
- Evolving your face-to-face course to a more blended teaching methodology, one in which some of year teaching is done on your campus learning management system (LMS)?
- Creating a fully (or mostly) online course?
My hypothesis is that the ability to collaborate with a learning designer is the single most important determinant of faculty successfully integrating technology into their teaching. Read more...
The Crazy Twitter Valuation
By Joshua Kim. As of this writing Twitter has a market capitalization of $24.46 billion dollars.
To put Twitter into some context, look at Hershey. (Founded in 1894, and on my mind during this Halloween season).
Hershey is valued at $21.66 billion. Last year Hershey took in $6.94 billion, and recognized $2.86 billion in profits. Read more...
EdTech Platform Change
By Joshua Kim. Look around at your campus edtech platforms.
It is a good bet that in 4 years these platforms will all have changed.
In the past it seemed like our edtech platforms stuck around forever. We were slow to choose because we knew we’d be slow to change. We worried about switching costs, about the pain for faculty and students in moving from one system to another. We talked about the opportunity costs in lost time to engage on course design and development if we would be forced to teach faculty how to use the new systems. Read more...
