By Lucy Ferriss. A few months ago we at Lingua Franca received an email from a suffering reader. His eyes are hurting and his ears are subject to a terrible sound. That sound is the verb lessen. Whatever happened to decrease? our discomfited reader would like to know. More...
02 octobre 2015
A Lesson in ‘Lessen’
The Great Punkin Controversy
By Ben Yagoda. Starbucks watchers were taken aback last month when the company made a surprise announcement about its standard-bearing fall beverage. More...
Academic Social Network Hopes to Change the Culture of Peer Review
By Jeffrey R. Young. The network is called Academia.edu, and it has grown to more than 25 million registered participants, who use it mainly to post their published papers in order to help others find them (and, it’s hoped, cite them). More...
What the Results of a Survey of Coursera Students Mean for Online Learning
By Ellen Wexler. When Coursera, Udacity, and edX started up within four months of one another, in 2012, The New York Times declared it the year of the MOOC. Now that the clamor is dying down, researchers are gauging what actually has developed in terms of massive open online courses. More...
5 Tips for Handling Grading in Large Online Classes
By Anastasia Salter. I’ve been chronicling my experiences this semester adapting my approach to teaching from my previous experience with small courses to a new challenge of large-scale classes, and particularly to the needs of a large online course. Read more...3 Tips for Handling Discussions in Online Courses
By Anastasia Salter. I’ve been teaching a large online class for the first time this semester, and as the course involves looking at a number of challenge interactive works and games I put a lot of emphasis on discussion forums and critical debate. Read more...How to Tame an Internet Troll
By Frank Pasquale. In James Thurber’s 1942 short story "The Catbird Seat," the boisterous Ulgine Barrows shatters the peaceful diligence of Erwin Martin, head of the filing department at his firm. More...
A Better Plan for Debt-Free College: Give Money Straight to Students
By David P. Haney. The presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have each proposed plans during their campaigns to funnel federal and state funds to public institutions so that needy students (under Clinton’s plan) or all students (under Sanders’s plan) could receive a free or very-low-cost college education. More...
#WatchWhatYouSay
By Frank Donoghue. Most academics are familiar with one or more well-publicized incidents in which professors were suspended, were fired, or had a hiring contract rescinded because of controversial statements they had made on social media. That common denominator should give pause to all academics who value their jobs. More...
Don’t Tell Me What’s Best for My Students
By Mason Stokes. Since I published an essay, "In Defense of Trigger Warnings," in The Chronicle about 18 months ago, such a defense has become even harder to mount. Though the much ballyhooed fear that faculty would soon be required to issue trigger warnings has failed to materialize (the one college that proposed such a requirement, Oberlin, has withdrawn it), public attention to the topic has resulted in a frenzy of too-easy condemnation and ridicule. More...
