By Colleen Flaherty. TIAA Institute on Thursday published findings of a national survey of more than 500 adjunct faculty members. The majority of adjunct instructors are over 40 and primarily teach at a single college or university, “countering common perceptions that faculty is younger and teach at multiple colleges while pursuing a tenure-track position,” according to TIAA. More...

The Bookmarklet Solution to the Password Problem
On the other hand, here's another solution to the password problem (one which won't get you indexed at Microsoft Central). This nifty script auto-generates a password based on a seed word and the name of the site you're trying to enter. And it seems to me that it wouldn't take a lot to completely automate this, so you basically don't see the password entry. More...

Exploring the Use of Blogs as Learning Spaces in the Higher Education Sector
The authors write that "the chief purpose of this paper is to comment, critically, on the potential for blogs as 'learning spaces' for students within the higher education sector," which it does with an examination of how blogs have been used at Harvard Law School and Queensland University of Technology. Some interesting bits, including some reflection on the dearth of refereed literature about blogging (the edu-bloggers tending to put the work in their blogs instead, where it is subject to a rather more vigorous screening). More...

Mr. Minister, Please Protect The Public Interest
Like many European nations, Canada is under pressure to ratify the new and sterner provisions of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) regulations. As Michael Geist writes, "U.S. broadcasters and the MPAA have actively lobbied for the creation of the World Intellectual Property Organization's Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations. This treaty would grant broadcasters increased powers over who may control, transmit, or record broadcast signals. The U.S. would even like to extend this power to Webcasts, which could be interpreted to cover Internet downloads." But if the Canadian government thinks ratification will take the pressure off, it is wrong. More...

Clarity Newsletter
Issue number three of the Clarity Newsletter arrived in my inbox this morning. The newsletter, sadly, fails the credibility test, asserting repeatedly its faith in "evidence-based science" (sometimes stretched to the absurd, as when having two test groups "act as control groups for each other") while making a slew of unsubstantiated (and unreferenced) assertions about learning and literacy in Canada. More...

UAE on Verge of Embracing High-tech Mode of Learning
Coverage from the two-day e-merging, e-learning conference being held at the Abu Dhabi Men's College. The UAE Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research, Shaikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, is reported as embracing new learning technologies. More...

A GMail-based Blog With 1000 MB of Entries
Some of the most entertaining work on the internet these days is being done around Google's new GMail service. Give people a gigabyte of storage and an application interface and who knows what you can do! One person has turned his email account into a file server. Another person has turned his email account into blog authoring software. This discussion on Slashdot raises the question: does Google mind? Hard to say. More...