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8 septembre 2013

Canada should bolster Africa’s universities, not drain their best students

http://beta.images.theglobeandmail.com/media/www/images/flag/gam-masthead.pngBy Steven Davis. At a recent event at Rideau Hall, hosted by Governor-General David Johnston, the Mastercard Foundation announced that it was providing $75-million dollars to three Canadian universities – the University of Toronto, the University of British Columbia and McGill – to educate 270 African students over the next ten years. It appears to be win-win. The universities get a much needed infusion of cash and the students get an education in some of the world’s best universities. More...

8 septembre 2013

Juggling Act

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSUa0Fk_7FQscWtrZHpz8OJg_QGcHVj2y63B7yEHt5K8aA7JDrjTD2O-wBy Barbara KaufmanToday's college or university president must be a champion fundraiser and a strong internal leader
Gone are the days when the hire of a university president was based primarily on a lifetime of scholarship and academic credentials that resonated with faculty. Gone, too, are the days when the president was expected to focus on internal governance and maintaining the institution's status quo. Increasingly, university leaders are under relentless pressure to raise private funds to protect and grow colleges and universities. And while for the president fundraising is often experienced as another full-time role, the effort must be balanced with the challenging demands of campus leadership. More...

8 septembre 2013

Norms, standards and metrics

http://www.insidehighered.com/sites/default/server_files/styles/blog_landing/public/green.jpg?itok=D8D3DXB7By G. Rendell. The top story of the hour, obviously, is Obama's initiative to do something (bomb?  debilitate?  degrade?  invade, but only with trainers and logisticians?  invade with combat forces?) to the nation of Syria. The ostensible reason is to punish the current Syrian regime for its deviation from "international norms". That phrase, which has been uttered by every administration official, every military-industrial-complex-funded member of Congress, and almost every apologist in the corporate media, is telling.  Not "international law".  Not any particular international treaty.  "International norms." Read more...

8 septembre 2013

Coming Up Short

http://www.insidehighered.com/sites/default/server_files/styles/blog_landing/public/confessions_of_a_community_college_dean_blog_header.jpg?itok=rd4sr8khBy Matt Reed. How do you know when you’re an adult?
According to Coming Up Short, by Jennifer Silva, today’s working-class twenty-somethings answer that question differently than previous generations, including my own, did.
Silva is a sociologist at Harvard, and her book is based on interviews with working-class millenials in Massachusetts and Virginia over the last few years.  Her thesis -- spoiler alert -- is that the classic working-class answer -- steady job, marriage, house, kids -- has lost its relevance, since it has become economically unfathomable. The kind of reliable, well-paying job that underlay the classic postwar American working class has mostly vanished now, replaced by short-term, insecure, poorly-paid jobs that don’t provide the material basis for a stable life. Read more...

7 septembre 2013

A broad, cultural education is vital to the health of a democratic society

http://static.guim.co.uk/static/7515301283cfe16f903a8b3593c8af220b510907/common/images/logos/the-guardian/news.gifBy . The Workers' Educational Association was set up to bring the joy of learning to the masses. Never has it been more relevant. The Workers' Educational Association (WEA) formally came into existence in 1903 and soon became a strong national presence. To understand whether it is still relevant in the 21st century, it is, as always, important to look at some aspects of the WEA's early history and some of the contrasting strands of thinking which characterise it still. More...

1 septembre 2013

Sustainability v. Competition

http://www.insidehighered.com/sites/default/server_files/styles/blog_landing/public/JustVisitingLogo_white.jpg?itok=K5uvzo_-By John Warner. In his recent address, President Obama has made it clear that he wants colleges and universities to “compete” with each other. Through a series of yet-to-be-specified metrics, institutes of higher education will be measured not on inputs (as the U.S. News and World Report rankings work), but on outcomes like graduation rates and job placement. The intention is determine the institute’s “value,” so that matriculating students can make better decisions. Ultimately, these metrics may be tied to Federal carrots like Pell Grants, with students being restricted to lower amounts for poorly performing schools. Presumably, schools will compete with others in the same category, so community colleges aren’t asked to measure themselves against the Ivy League. Read more...

1 septembre 2013

Three Visions

http://www.insidehighered.com/sites/default/server_files/styles/blog_landing/public/confessions_of_a_community_college_dean_blog_header.jpg?itok=rd4sr8khBy Matt Reed. The new academic year is about to start.  Every year, around this time, I reflect on how I’d like to see community colleges work. In my perfect world, a community college would be a collection of mad scientists experimenting with the best ways to help students learn.  They’d hail from all sorts of disciplines, and presumably some of them would have better grooming than the traditional mad scientist, but they’d share the excitement and focus on the task at hand.  The college would be a constant cauldron of experimentation and communication of results.  In this view, academic freedom exists to enable experimentation.  Over time, as results accumulated, the effects for the students would get progressively better. Read more...

1 septembre 2013

How to ace an exam without taking it

http://dizqy8916g7hx.cloudfront.net/moneta/widgets/wp_personal_post/v1/img/logo.pngBy Valerie Strauss. How can you ace an exam without taking it? Well, you probably can’t, but writer Gertrude Stein did.
Stein went to Radcliffe College from 1893 to 1897. When she was taking a final exam in philosophy, she wrote on her test paper:
    Dear Professor James, I am so sorry but I do not feel a bit like an examination in philosophy.
Professor James responded:
    Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel. I often feel like that myself. Read more...

31 août 2013

Intuition and ingenuity: Alan Turing’s work and impact

http://www.oecd.org/media/oecdorg/styleassets/images/header/logooecd_en.pngLegend has it that Apple’s rainbow-coloured logo showing the apple with a bite out of it is in homage to Alan Turing “the father of modern computing”. Turing died of cyanide poisoning on 7 June 1954, two years after being convicted of homosexuality and accepting chemical castration instead of prison. A half-eaten apple was found next to him, and one theory is that he’d laced it with cyanide, his own homage to the wicked queen in Snow White, his favourite Disney cartoon. Another theory is that he died accidentally after inhaling cyanide fumes from apparatus he had in his bedroom for electroplating spoons. A third explanation is that he really did commit suicide, but set up the apparatus so his mother would think it was an accident. The coroner didn’t test the apple for cyanide, so we’ll never know for sure.
If there are doubts about Turing’s death, his life is fairly well-known, or at least some aspects of it. His most noteworthy exploit for the general public was helping to break the code of the Enigma machines the Germans used to communicate with their submarines during the Second World War. If you’d like to get some idea of how he did it, take a look at the excerpts from the “Enigma Paper” in Alan Turing, His Work and Impact, just published by Elsevier. Cryptography is the second of four parts of this thousand-page overview presenting Turing’s most significant works from the four-volume Collected Works along with comment, analysis and anecdote from leading scholars. The other three parts are on Turing’s contributions to computability, artificial intelligence, and biology. Read more...

27 août 2013

Et si nos deux pouces nous invitaient à changer le monde ?

http://blog.educpros.fr/jean-charles-cailliez/files/2013/04/blog-jean-charles-caillez2.jpgBlog Educpros de Jean-Charles Cailliez. Avant d’enseigner quoi que ce soit à qui que ce soit, au moins faut-il le connaître. Qui se présente, aujourd’hui, à l’école, au collège, au lycée, à l’université ? Telles sont les premières lignes, en guise de préface, du livre de Michel SERRES « Petite Poucette », paru aux Editions Le Pommier. Mais qui est cette héroïne, nouvel humain du XXIème siècle, à laquelle l’auteur fait allusion ? Quelle est donc cette créature qui utilise nuit et jour ses deux petits pouces en complément de son cerveau ? Pour le savoir, il vous suffira juste de passer une heure à lire les 82 pages de son ouvrage remarquable dont le sous-titre est : « Le monde a tellement changé que les jeunes doivent tout réinventer : une manière de vivre ensemble, des institutions, une manière d’être et de connaître… »Suite...

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