By Chantal Braganza. There are moments in Gabriella Coleman’s new book that clearly illustrate the diligent research she undertook for her book on Anonymous, the bombastic hacktivist collective. There are the late nights spent on her computer watching chat-room conversations explode over whether the group should participate in an illegal disruption of PayPal’s donations service. More...
By David Kim. Find your passion and learn how to apply it to make positive change – these are the tasks for the 21st-century student.We often lose sight of the bigger picture when we become too focused with a goal or an objective. More...
By Paul Bray. With university increasingly seen as a ticket to a well-paid job, Paul Bray investigates the heart-vs-head debate: should you only study a subject you love? Read more...
By Kelly Egan. Close to 100,000 university students are out of class in Toronto this week due to labour troubles.
But don’t blame the professors. They hardly seem to teach anymore.
The strikes by teaching assistants and contract instructors have shone a light on the high percentage of courses that are taught by “non-traditional” professors, if we can use the term, across Ontario. (This whole debate is mired in a language bog: adjunct, sessional, contract, full/part-time, associate/tenured, professor/lecturer, TA, BA, MA, babble, babble, begin screaming.) More...
By Phil Hill. As we get closer to the release of the new e-Literate TV series on personalized learning, Michael and I will be posting previews highlighting some of the more interesting segments from the series. When we first talked about the series with its sponsors, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, they agreed to give us the editorial independence to report what we find, whether it is good, bad, or indifferent. More...
By Michael Goot. SUNY’s community colleges are seeking increased funding of $250 per student for initiatives to hold onto students and decrease the number of remedial classes they have to take. More...
By Paula V. Smith. The academic landscape is fraught with risk—everything from hazardous chemicals and internal fraud, to flu outbreaks and budget shortfalls. It seems obvious that any college or university would invest effort to identify and rank its current top risks, if just to assign the right level of attention and resources to each. More...
By Herman Berliner. Traveling during the heart of winter can be challenging. Weather can change travel plans in a heartbeat and putting all the pieces back into place doesn’t necessarily happen easily. A recent family vacation made clear that coming and going can take more than one twist or turn. Read more...
By Rosemarie Emanuele. The study of Chaos Theory, a fascinating sub-field of math, was born out of the recognition that small changes can have large effects. It is often illustrated by the story of a butterfly flapping its wings thus leading to a tornado thousands of miles away. Indeed, this entire line of study was the result of a realization that rounding numbers earlier than expected can lead to results from a computer program that greatly diverge from those with no rounding. I found myself thinking of this recently as my course in Higher Geometries studied fractals (derived from equations that account for chaos.) On almost the same day, a colleague told me about her newest project. Read more...
By Laura Tropp. We moved a couple of weeks ago and had to change the children to a new school mid-year. My son said to me that it’s fine, as long as I can find him a bunch of nerds to hang out with.
I realized, though it didn’t exactly surprise me, that my son self-identifies as a nerd. This is such a change from when I was growing up. Then, nerds were someone to feel sorry for. They were mocked in popular culture: the entire plot of movie Revenge of the Nerds centered on nerds as social outcasts and underdogs. Read more...
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