Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Oronte. Eudora Welty says, “Place is one of the lesser angels that watch over the racing hand of fiction,” though she quickly adds that “place can be seen…to have a great deal to do with…goodness, if not to be responsible for it. […] The truth is, fiction depends for its life on place. Location is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of ‘What happened? Who’s here? Who’s coming?’—and that is the heart’s field.”
As I mentioned in my last post, we’ve been talking a lot in workshop about representations of place. We live down the road from a famous city that invites notice, that wants to be discussed and remembered, in a region that prides itself on easily-named features and whose people are often distinctive. I don’t know why a writer wouldn’t make an attempt, eventually, at a story set here. Read more...

By Tracy Mitrano. I don’t think I have ever heard a term of intellectual property in a State of the Union speech before!  How exciting!    And why?  May I recommend Jaffe and Lerner’s book, “Innovation and Its Discontents” for an early, solid treatment of the problems in this area that journalists on occasion have followed up on.  (See link, for example.) 
Why would the President raise this issue to high level of a State of Union address?  I assume because it has become clear to just about everyone, major corporations not least, that the system as revised in the early 1990’s is so flawed as to be serving almost no one except the filing attorneys in the favored state of Texas.  In short, there is a growing consensus that innovation is suffering for the failure to address the unintended consequences of the most recent round of legislative patent revisions. Read more...

By Tracy Mitrano. In 2005, after teaching a weeklong course on Internet Law and the MiNE Program at Universita Cattolica del Sacre Cuore in Piacenza, Italy, I wrote an article entitled "The Internet, The Pope and The iPod."
Reading about Pope Francis’s remarks to the illuminati assembled at Davos reminded me of that otherwise long ago forgotten piece. Read more...

By John Warner. The longer I do this college instructing stuff, the more convinced I become that it’s impossible to teach what I most want my students to learn. What’s more, it’s probably also impossible to measure whether or not they’ve learned what I want them to learn, and definitely not possible within the timeline of a single semester. Part of my problem is that I have a difficult time even articulating what I most want them to learn. Read more...

By John Warner. Clay Shirky is so concerned about the state of higher education that he can’t help but want to destroy it. In a recent blog post, he argues that we are in the midst of a new (or not so new) “reality.” This reality, to Shirky’s figuring, is the end of higher education’s “Golden Age.” The solution – which is no real surprise coming from someone who has made his living as an Internet futurist – is to embrace our digitally mediated future. Read more...