By Steve Joordens. In a previous post I described the general philosophy of our lab as one focused on building “Stairways to Heaven”; that is, tools that allow us to transform education from where it is now, to what we’d like it to be. That post was a little nonspecific, so in this post I present three of our current “stairways” in a little more detail. Our most established staircase; peerScholar was originally developed to bring written assignments back to our very large (then about 1000 students) Introduction to Psychology class. Read more...
05 avril 2014
Stairways to Heaven Part 2
Four Emergent Higher Education Models
By Steven Mintz. The model that dominates non-profit higher education today is under severe stress, particularly at the less-selective institutions that serve the bulk of American students. Four forces – behavioral, demographic, financial, and political -- have combined to disrupt these institutions’ business practices. First, the student swirl. As fewer students earn their credits at a single institution, and take courses from multiple providers -- from early college high schools, at community colleges, and from various online purveyors – the system of cross-subsidies that institutions relied upon to pay for small upper-division classes erodes. Read more...
Colleges as Political Playthings - Pt. 5: Being Nicer to Your Toys
By John Warner. Yesterday the South Carolina state house released a revised proposal regarding the merger of the College of Charleston with the Medical University of South Carolina. Perhaps stung by the blowback regarding the original proposed merger, Representatives Jim Merrill (R) and Leon Stavrinakis (D) put forward a plan to scotch the shotgun marriage and “create a research university at the existing University of Charleston, South Carolina.” Read more...
The Google Gmail Litigation
By Tracy Mitrano. So far the higher education press has paid scant attention to the Google Gmail Litigation case in the Northern District of California Federal Court, San Jose. If there is a jurisdiction worth watching for issues of consumer privacy and intellectual property, more patent than copyright, this is the one! And of all the cases in the former category, none is more important than Google Gmail. Read more...
IPAT considered harmful (#5 of more)
By G. Rendell. Most of the time when students tell me about their environmental concerns, an underlying optimism comes from their faith that technology can save us. Sometimes, they're attending Greenback U to learn more about one or another set of technologies, so that they can be part of the salvation effort. Others hope to learn to teach about exciting new technologies, or influence public policy to gin up more support for environmentally sensitive technologies, or conduct the basic science on which those new technologies can be based, or write books and articles about how wonderful the (upcoming) new technologies are. Read more...
On Their Own
By Laura Tropp. I was at a big chain store with my children, and I had to use the restroom. My 9½-year-old son refused to go in with me, saying that he will not go in a “girl’s” restroom. He insisted he would wait in front of the door for me. Though he wasn’t acknowledging it, this marked a significant turning point in our relationship: this was the first time I would leave him unattended in a public place. Read more...Math Geek Mom: Advice For Younger Scholars
By Rosemarie Emanuele. As the semester begins to wind down, I come to the end of teaching a semester of Calculus II. This is the semester of Calculus that sometimes gives the subject a bad name. Included in it are such things as revolving a function around a line that may or may not be the x or y axis, substituting in for trigonometric functions using special trigonometric identities, and a technique known as “integration by parts,” in which a difficult integral is decomposed into an equation including an integral that is much easier to solve. As we plod through these topics, I often find myself giving my students advice on how they might go about the often “creative” process of making the required substitutions. As one student told me “I see what you are doing, but I don’t know if I would think to do that myself.” I found myself thinking of this coaching when I read an essay in TIME this past week about advice that is given to young women just starting their careers. Read more...The Conundrum of Higher Education Master's Programs
By Eric Stoller. "Where did you go for grad school?" I was asked that question while working at the University of Illinois at Chicago back in 2003. Working at my first salaried student affairs position, I didn't know that people went to graduate school for higher education. I started looking at masters programs in student affairs / higher education. It turns out that there are scores of programs in the United States. Unfamiliar with assistantships and tuition waivers, I lucked out with my grad program. Oregon State University (OSU) offered me a graduate assistantship and a tuition waiver. Essentially, I was able to go to grad school without incurring any debt. My assistantship within the department of Enrollment Management at OSU provided me with a monthly paycheck that I used to pay for my living expenses. Plus, not having to pay tuition was a tremendous benefit. Read more...404 Day: Protecting Kids from ... What?
By Barbara Fister. Yesterday I followed tweets from Gretchen Caserotti, director of the public library in Meridian, Idaho, as she attended a school board hearing over Sherman Alexie’s young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Alexie is one of my favorite writers. It’s hard to imagine what is so objectionable about this story about a bookish Native kid who gets bullied as much for bookishness as for being an Indian at a mostly white school. But then, I couldn’t really get why people in my true-blue home state of Minnesota objected to Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park, either. Parents complained that some of the characters in the book talk like, um, teenagers. Actually, like fourth-graders. If you don’t like that kind of language, don’t go near the playground during recess. Read more...
The Unproductive Search for Bad Campus Actors
By Joshua Kim. Let’s start by trying to come to some agreement about the major challenges facing higher ed.
Our higher ed challenges all fall under categories of cost, access, and quality - and our challenges are large.
I’ll list a few, and you can add to the list. (And this list will not be exhaustive, as any complete list of higher ed problems would keep us here all day). Read more...
