By Vincent DeFrancesco. The Chronicle Book Club this month discussed What Is College For? The Public Purpose of Higher Education. Chronicle web producer Vincent DeFrancesco discussed issues raised by the book with the book’s editors, Ellen Condliffe Lagemann and Harry Lewis. The chat took place on Thursday, April 24, at 10:20 a.m., U.S. Eastern time. More...
By Vincent DeFrancesco. Chapter 6 of What Is College For? was a bit of a departure from the book’s central theme. The previous chapters focused on the lost public purposes of higher education and ways to revive the teaching of those purposes. This chapter’s author, Catharine Stimpson, dean emerita of New York University’s Graduate School of Arts and Science, touches on the book’s theme very briefly. More...
By Kit Nicholls. I think I first heard a student declare a book “not relatable” about five years ago. I got the gist, but the word struck me as strange, clumsy. Before long, though, it had become a regular part of student vernacular, and I started to see it even in the The New York Times. Students use this word to express their sense that a text can be related to, that it is accessible to them. Unsurprisingly, contemporary pop culture is by and large relatable. Daniel Defoe? Not relatable. More...
By Jennifer McGaha. Personal writing is frivolous, something best left to those students with the poor judgment to actually major in creative writing. This was essentially the opinion I heard expressed in an English-faculty meeting last fall. We should be teaching our first-year, general-education students to write for their intended professions, my colleague said; teaching “expressionist crap” is a pointless diversion, a waste of our students’ time and ours. More...
By Amy Cavender. This post was originally scheduled to run last week, but then there was Heartbleed. So it’s only now that we get to look back to this year’s Day of Digital Humanities event, held on April 8 and hosted for the second year in a row by the wonderful team at Matrix, including Ethan Wattrall. For those who may be unfamiliar with the event, it’s a day in which those working in digital humanities publicly document some of their work day and discuss their work. More...
By Natalie Houston. Online communications tools such as Skype and Google Hangouts can make scholarly collegiality and collaboration more personal than email-only relationships. But what isn’t always easy is scheduling the time for phone calls or online meetings, especially when you’re collaborating across several time zones. More...
By Natalie Houston. Grading student assignments is a significant feature of many academics’ workload, especially as the end of semester nears. In the years since our first round up post, From the Archives: On Grading we’ve written quite a few useful posts about grading philosopies, tools, and approaches:
Philosophies and Methods
In Cross-Disciplinary Grading Techniques, Heather wrote about adopting humanities methods for grading open-ended assignments to her physics courses. More...
By Adeline Koh. This is the tenth interview in a series, Digital Challenges to Academic Publishing, by Adeline Koh. Each article in this series features an interview with an academic publisher, press or journal editor on how their organization is changing in response to the digital world. The series has featured interviews with Duke University Press, Anvil Academic, NYU Press, MIT Press and the Penn State University Press.
In this interview I speak with Martin Paul Eve (@martin_eve, Lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln, UK and co-founder of the Open Library of Humanities.
AK: Hi Martin, thanks so much for speaking with me today. First of all, could you please tell me more about the history of the Open Library of the Humanities, and what problems in academic publishing it intends to intervene in?
ME: If you will forgive a bit of narrative backstory, I’d like to begin on a personal note that leads into the rationale for the OLH. My first foray into the world of open access came when, as a Ph.D. student, I felt a sense of outrage upon realising that the system of academic publishing was one wherein academics gave their work to publishers (without compensation), then academics performed peer review (without compensation), until finally they proofread the material (without compensation). More...
By Adeline Koh. The Internet’s potential to create important political change has been one of the most pressing news topics over the past five years. Its relative openness has proved instrumental to recent social revolutions, such as the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. A big factor in this is the principle of “Net Neutrality,” which holds that all data on the Internet should be treated equally by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and governments, meaning that certain websites and services should not be privileged over others. However, this principle is being threatened.
Yesterday, the Federal Communications Commission released a statement to introduce new rules that would allow ISPs to charge companies a premium rate for content, or an Internet “fast lane”. More...
By Ryan Cordell. Many—though far from all, I realize—ProfHacker readers are involved in the digital humanities (DH). More than two years ago I wrote about the launch of DHCommons, a resource for connecting scholars interested in collaborating on DH projects. Later that year I wrote about how DHCommons was partnering with the Association for Computers and the Humanities to connect new DH scholars with mentors. Since then DHCommons has partnered with centerNet, the international network of digital humanities centers, to launch a new journal that will peer review mid-stage DH projects. The central goals of the DHCommons journal can be found in the vision statement. More...
/https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
