By Jason B. Jones. One of the most popular, if controversial, features of iOS 9 is the built-in support for content blockers in Safari. On the one hand, I think most people are probably willing to pay for quality content; on the other hand, a lot of pretty awful stuff goes on in the world of online advertising, especially on mobile devices. Trying to access many mobile sites, especially mobile news sites, can result in massive amounts of data and battery use … just to get to the ads. Read more...22 octobre 2015
Content Blocking in iOS 9 with Adamant
By Jason B. Jones. One of the most popular, if controversial, features of iOS 9 is the built-in support for content blockers in Safari. On the one hand, I think most people are probably willing to pay for quality content; on the other hand, a lot of pretty awful stuff goes on in the world of online advertising, especially on mobile devices. Trying to access many mobile sites, especially mobile news sites, can result in massive amounts of data and battery use … just to get to the ads. Read more...A Top Proponent of Higher-Ed Disruption Moves to Put His Theories Into Practice
By Goldie Blumenstyk. After years of preaching “disruptive innovation” for higher education, one of the most visible proponents of the theory is going to try a little disrupting of his own. More...
New Grant Will Create Prizes for Faculty Using Digital Courseware
By Goldie Blumenstyk. The Online Learning Consortium, in a move to encourage professors to develop and use digital courseware, will offer new prizes for faculty-led teams that advance and adopt sophisticated online courses with “a strong pedagogical focus and a sustained impact on student success in gateway courses,” the organization announced at its conference here last week. More...
MOOCs Are Still Rising, at Least in Numbers
By Ellen Wexler. When one of the first massive open online courses appeared at Stanford University, 160,000 students enrolled. It was 2011, and fewer than 10 MOOCs existed worldwide. More...
University-Run Boot Camps Offer Students Marketable Skills — but Not Course Credit
By Ellen Wexler. Level, a venture that offers students courses in data analytics, has a motto of sorts. It’s written in large letters across the program’s website: “Real skills. Real experience. Two months.” More...
Measuring Academic Skills and ‘Grit’ to Help Identify At-Risk Students
By Ellen Wexler. With the help of a grant of nearly $2 million, Excelsior College wants to use analytics to identify at-risk students. More...
How Video Games Are Becoming University-Approved Sports
By Ellen Wexler. When 800 video gamers arrived at the University of Cincinnati’s basketball arena on Saturday morning, 8,000 feet of extension cords and 11,000 feet of Ethernet cables awaited them. Check-in was at 9 a.m., and they had a lot to carry: laptops, desktops, TV monitors, GameCube controllers. More...
Happy Birthday, Lingua Franca!
By Allan Metcalf. Slightly more than four years and a thousand posts ago, at the behest of the editor Heidi Landecker at The Chronicle of Higher Education, this Lingua Franca blog came into being. Since that time, day after day, our motley crew has mused, elucidated, queried, uncovered, advertised, challenged, and pontificated about language, more or less as Heidi and Liz McMillen, The Chronicle’s editor, had envisioned. And you, dear readers, have responded with everything from dissertations of your own to completely irrelevant remarks, adventuring into niches we never had thought of. More...
Everyday Artificial Stupidity
By Geoffrey Pullum. Monday afternoon. The classroom projector announces: “In 2 minutes the projector will go into standby mode.” After 60 seconds, it changes to: “In 1 minutes the projector will go into standby mode.”
Was it really too hard to make that “1 minute”. More...
The Third Flaw in the Second Amendment
By Geoffrey Pullum. I was at a department barbecue in California last summer, where conversation had turned to some recent school shooting, and how gun-control legislation can never be enacted because we cannot get round the Second Amendment. More...
