By Geoffrey Pullum. Microsoft’s astonishingly scurrilous campaign to damage confidence in Gmail is still active after nearly 10 years. Large ads in magazines repeat content from the Google-baiting website www.scroogled.com, which is dedicated solely to promoting fear of privacy invasions. More...
08 décembre 2013
MOOCs as Neocolonialism: Who Controls Knowledge?
The following is by Philip G. Altbach, research professor and director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College. Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are the latest effort to harness information technology for higher education. While they are still in a nascent stage of development, many in academe are enthusiastic about their potential to be an inexpensive way of delivering an education to vast audiences. More...
Google Reads Your Emails?
The Freshperson Problem
By Anne Curzan. Earlier this week, I had my copy-editor hat on and was working my way through a newsletter for a graduate program at the university. I was fixing typos, inserting and deleting commas (often for the sake of consistency), changing words to avoid repetition, and the like. Then at one point, I watched myself prescriptively cross out the phrase “freshman composition” and reword it as “first-year composition.”I have long been a supporter of nonsexist language reform, from using singular generic they to replacing –man words with nongendered alternatives. Read more...Reversing the Selfie
By Allan Metcalf. Today I can offer a twofer—my first sighting of a new word, and the opportunity to do good deeds that arises from it. The new word is narcissism undone, “un” done if you will. Take the “selfie,” the photo you make of yourself and blatantly upload to Twitter or Facebook or Snapchat or Instagram or whatever. It’s the epitome of cute selfishness that supposedly characterizes the millennial generation. But then put “un” in front of it, and behold, you have the “unselfie,” or, with a hashtag, the “#unselfie.”A colleague referred me to “What if our selfies were unselfish?” a November 14 post on LinkedIn by Nicolas Bordas. Read more...‘No Hangeo’
By Ilan Stavans. I’ve come across the expression on street corners, near pizzerias, outside grocery stores, always as a prohibition. The location is invariably in Latino neighborhoods. Needless to say, the expression isn’t registered in either the OED or in the DLE (Diccionario de la Lengua Española de la Real Academia), which doesn’t surprise me. Lexicons have been slow in incorporating Spanglishisms, even one as versatile as this one. More...
Say, ‘What’?
By Lucy Ferriss. Punctuating dialogue, for reasons I fail to understand completely, is one of the hardest things for my fiction-writing students to master. Autocorrect inserts a capital after any form of so-called terminal punctuation, so “Are you going out?” he asked becomes “Are you going out?” He asked. Certain that the verb accompanying the speaker’s name is the dialogue tag, many students write, She laughed, “That’s a funny joke.” Master classes on the rules, the craft, and the art of punctuating dialogue make some impression, but deeply confused students often default to abjuring any sort of punctuation: “I think I’ll go out” he said “after I’ve done the laundry.” More...
QuickWire: Digital Tools for College Prep Still Miss Many Students
By Hannah Winston. As more and more aspects of higher education become digitized or enhanced by technology, the process of applying to college and planning a successful career there has followed suit. The problem? Students still fall through the cracks. A new report looks at the plethora of digital tools marketed to students to help them get into and make the most of college. It tackles individual websites and mobile apps, like College Confidential and Find Tuition, and provides a comprehensive look at what each offers. More...
From a Million MOOC Users, a Few Early Research Results
By Lawrence Biemiller. Preliminary results of a study of 16 massive open online courses offered through the University of Pennsylvania show that only a small percentage of people who start the courses finish them—and that, on average, only half of those who register for the courses even watch the first lecture. The study, conducted by the university’s Graduate School of Education, is reviewing data from about a million users of the courses, which Penn offered on the Coursera platform, from June 2012 to June 2013. More...
Posting Your Latest Article? You Might Have to Take It Down
By Jennifer Howard. Guy Leonard received an unpleasant surprise in his inbox early this morning: a notice from Academia.edu saying it had taken down a copy of an article of his that he’d posted on the research-sharing platform. The reason? A takedown request from Elsevier, which publishes the journal in which the paper had appeared. Mr. Leonard, a research fellow in the University of Exeter’s College of Life and Environmental Sciences, tweeted his dismay and posted a link to a screengrab of the notice. Read more...
College Board Delays New SAT Until 2016
By Eric Hoover. The College Board has delayed the release of the revamped SAT by one year, the organization announced on Tuesday. The new examination will make its debut in the spring of 2016. At the College Board’s annual conference, in October, David Coleman, its president, said colleges would get an early look at the new test this winter, a year ahead of the original rollout date. But in an email to college counselors on Tuesday, Mr. Coleman said feedback from admissions officials and other experts had persuaded the organization to push back its schedule. “We heard clearly from our members … that you need more time, and we listened,” Mr. Coleman wrote. More...
