By Carl Straumsheim. An institution’s decision to drop print books for ebooks may rankle traditionalists, but at the University Colorado at Boulder, it’s the open-to-innovation crowd that is speaking out. CU-Boulder is one of many institutions that have moved away from stocking print books to signing ebook subscription deals with publishers. Read more...06 septembre 2014
Cutting Costs and Quality?
By Carl Straumsheim. An institution’s decision to drop print books for ebooks may rankle traditionalists, but at the University Colorado at Boulder, it’s the open-to-innovation crowd that is speaking out. CU-Boulder is one of many institutions that have moved away from stocking print books to signing ebook subscription deals with publishers. Read more...A Platform for All Purposes
By Carl Straumsheim. The online education platform provider EdCast, Silicon Valley’s latest contribution to the ed-tech space, wants to be simultaneously massive and intimate, private and public -- and preferably to stay out of the spotlight. In simple terms, EdCast is a service provider built on top of Open edX, the Cambridge, Mass.-based MOOC provider’s open-source initiative. Read more...Gambling on the Lottery
By Paul Fain. A growing number of states are using lottery money for college scholarships. But the politically popular lottery funds often fail to live up to their expectations, according to a new report from the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. The report breaks down how 11 states have earmarked lottery revenue for higher education. Read more...
Converting Reading Teachers
By Paul Fain. Physics professors don’t teach students how to read better. That’s what Lilit Haroyan, a physics instructor at Pasadena City College, thought when she was introduced to a faculty training program called Reading Apprenticeship. Read more...
The Distance to Ideal? That’s what I need to know
By Brian Mathews. This is a tool concept that I want to explore. The blue line represents “everything we want to do” in our ideal state. This requires looking across all services and removing (or sunsetting) the ones that are no longer essential. The objective is to gather everything that represents what we should be doing. More...
In Defense of Theory
By Julia H. Chang. Is gender theory relevant to undergraduate students? Skeptics have long dismissed theory’s intellectual import largely on the basis of style. In the 90s, Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler, and Homi Bhabha were scrutinized for their “pretentiously opaque” prose, “bad writing,” and “indecipherable jargon” respectively. Of course not all scholars are equally subject to these sorts of critiques. As Butler noted in her response, “The targets … have been restricted to scholars on the left whose work focuses on topics like sexuality, race, nationalism and the workings of capitalism.” Refuting similar critiques in regard to queer theory, Michael Warner has recently asserted that “the attack on difficult style has often been a means to reassert the very standards of common sense that queer theory rightly challenged.” More...
Playing In The Classroom With The Ivanhoe Game
By Prof. Hacker. This past April, the University of Virginia Scholars’ Lab‘s Praxis Fellows released their practicum project, the Ivanhoe Game. Since the launch, the Fellows have dispersed for the summer: I graduated, and several others went off to visit family and friends. We all wrapped up our semesters and took a well-earned vacation, as, I hope, did most ProfHacker readers. Now, however, the fall semester quickly approaches, and the moment is ripe for renewed consideration of the Ivanhoe Game. Read more...Visualize Your Promotion Portfolio with Cmap
By Prof. Hacker. This past summer I attended an AAC&U Institute on High-Impact Practices and Student Success. It was valuable in and of itself, but while there my colleagues and I were introduced to a new tool by our faculty mentor: Cmap, a cognitive mapping tool. I’m going to run through some of how to use it, but my main point here is to share how I thought I might use this (or any cognitive-mapping tool) to visualize and make sense of a promotion portfolio. Read more...What’s Your PGP?
By Allan Metcalf. It’s a question we didn’t have to answer in the 20th century. In fact, it’s a question that didn’t exist until recently. We have this question now because we have a growing menu of gender identity. Last week I discussed it with regard to the abbreviations LGBTQQ2IA and Quiltbag. More...
The Case of the Sinister Buttocks
By Geoffrey Pullum. The story behind this strange sentence was first told by Times Higher Education and has since been summarized (often inaccurately) by more than 7,000 other news sources. Lucy Ferriss alluded to it here on Lingua Franca last week. Its reference to musicians and liturgies might suggest a musical or religious theme. But no, this sentence, in a senior thesis submitted by an undergraduate to a London-area university, purported to be about business information systems. More...
