Formation Continue du Supérieur

9 mars 2014

Linguistics qua Affliction

By Geoffrey Pullum. I’d like to tell you something about what it’s like to have a training in linguistics, if I may. The cheap pine boxes used for shipping bottles of wine from vineyards in France, Italy, and Spain make nice storage boxes when cleaned up and oiled. Several are in use in my home. (I am getting to my point; trust me.) One box bears the name MONTRESOR™, together with some lines in Italian:
Egli me riprese il braccio,
e continuammo il cammino.
- Queste cantine – osservò – sono molto estese.
- I Montresor – gli risposi – sono una grande e numerosa famiglia.
- Com’è il vostro emblema? – L’ho dimenticato …
- E il motto?
- Nemo me impune lacessit.
- Bello! – concluse lui.
Nei suoi occhi scintillava il vino. Read more...

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9 mars 2014

Auto-Corrected

By Ilan Stavans. “Can I be spermed?” a student asked in an email last year, requesting to forgo an extra assignment. I laughed. At the bottom of the message, it read: “Sent from my iPhone.”
In less than five minutes, the student wrote back. “Apologies, Prof. It wasn’t me but A-C. I really meant ‘spared’.” And she added: “It won’t happy again.”
This time I just smiled. Read more...

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9 mars 2014

Perfect!

By Anne Curzan. This past weekend I escaped the polar vortex for a few days of vacation in warmer climes, and I found myself thinking a lot about the word perfect. It had nothing to do with the weather (which was lovely, but not perfect) or the hotel (also lovely, but is any hotel perfect?). It was the service. Not that the service was perfect. It just seemed that everything I ordered or said was perfect. Read more...

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9 mars 2014

Hello!

By Allan Metcalf. Electronic technology has had an impact on our language. And one of the greatest impacts, like that of an asteroid smashing into the Yucatan peninsula, is the way we greet each other: Hello!
Most greetings, in English or other languages, involve respect (Sir), the day (Good morning), health (How do you do, Howdy), or the like. Informally nowadays we say Hey or Hi, which might be condensations of How are you. Read more...

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9 mars 2014

Breaking Down Barriers Between the Humanities and the Sciences

By Leslie Niiro. When I graduate from Duke University with a liberal-arts degree (hopefully of my own design), I will never have taken a physics class where I mastered Gaussian surfaces. I won’t have studied dehydrohalogenation of alkyl halides in organic chemistry or the life cycle of Lycopodium in biology. Even after looking up these terms in Wikipedia, I doubt I’ll remember what they mean by the time this post is published. More...

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9 mars 2014

Interdisciplinary Research and Critical Friends

By Elizabeth Pitts. A couple of years ago, Lila McDowell wrote a piece for The Chronicle that described “critical friends” as an essential part of managing the division inherent in interdisciplinary research. Critical friends, she wrote, are the people who challenge us to reconceptualize the obvious—the colleagues and mentors we rely on most, the ones who pay us the courtesy of letting us know when our writing is fuzzy or our arguments are weak. I’ve remembered this phrase during recent discussions in Professor Davidson’s MOOC on the history and future of higher education. More...

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9 mars 2014

A Practical Guide for Institutional Change

By Matthew Clark. This week in “History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education,” we’re discussing the topic of institutional change. Specifically, we’re considering key strategies that will help us make important changes at colleges and universities. As we consider the development of our own strategies, Professor Davidson encourages us to “make alliances with other change makers” and “take change personally.” Along these lines, I would like to provide a brief practical guide to how those suggestions might be carried out. More...

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9 mars 2014

Getting in the MOOC

By Gregory Karp. Massive open online classes offer enrichment during down time, and the ROI is better than TV. Free entertainment online is nothing new, but what if you could access a form of entertainment and enrichment over the Internet that others pay thousands of dollars for and that keeps you occupied for weeks at a time?
That's one of the allures of MOOCs — massive open online classes. They're college classes taught online, some by the world's leading experts in their fields at famous universities. More...

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9 mars 2014

Black Students at Harvard Speak Out Through Photo Campaign

By Vincent DeFrancesco. A photo campaign called “I, Too, Am Harvard” is causing a commotion on the Ivy League campus. The campaign, inspired by a play of the same name that will have its premiere on March 7, highlights “the faces and voices of black students at Harvard College,” according to the project’s Tumblr page. More...

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9 mars 2014

More Than 150 Colleges Pledge to Increase Study-Abroad Efforts

By Ian Wilhelm. The Institute of International Education on Monday announced an effort to double the number of students who study abroad by 2020. More than 150 colleges have pledged to take steps toward that goal, including establishing scholarships for travel overseas or diversifying the types of students going abroad. The institute says it wants to recruit at least 500 colleges to make similar commitments. According to the institute, in 2011-12, the most recent year for which data are available, less than 10 percent of undergraduates—295,000 students—studied overseas. The institute’s project joins other efforts to send more American students to China and Latin America. More...

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