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20 avril 2013

Humanities still matter, say experts at U of R summit

By Kerry Benjoe. Humans will never be obsolete, which is why social sciences and humanities will always be relevant - even in today's rapidly changing society, say some experts. That was the message at the Humanities and Social Sciences summit hosted by the University of Regina on Wednesday.
"Technology and people are one," said Antonia Maioni, president of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. "It's not just the way you build a machine or the way you use technology when building data systems, but it's also what you put in the system. You can't have video games without having content about what the video games are about."
The summit - Balance and Change in the 21st Century - is to create an opportunity for educators to meet with leaders from the Prairie Region to talk about the importance of finding that balance between economic growth and development with the need to support cultural awareness, meaningful employment and education. Read more...

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20 avril 2013

Universities, the media and a War on Knowledge?

This is a guest post by University Affairs’ regular contributor, Rosanna Tamburri. I graduated from journalism school more than 25 years ago in what in hindsight can only be considered as the glory days for the industry. The economy was picking up. Newspapers were expanding. New ones were being launched. And no one had heard of the internet. Many of us, if not immediately, soon found jobs with dependable incomes and nice benefits. Over the years I have watched friends and colleagues lose those jobs or walk away from them as technological forces have reshaped the industry, wiping out advertising dollars and gutting newsrooms. Turns out those who toil away in academia have it almost as rough. Earlier this week a panel discussion billed as “The War on Knowledge?” and held in advance of June’s Worldviews 2013 conference on global trends in media and higher education resulted in a lively debate. The gist of it was whether higher education is under attack and what role, if any, the media plays in that. Read more...

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20 avril 2013

Revisiting Your Learning Management System

By Anastasia Salter.This month I conducted a workshop on “Thinking Outside the Course Management System” as part of a series on “Networked Learning” we’re running at the University of Baltimore. Many of us at ProfHacker are big believers in using open tools and alternative platforms for our courses instead of our university systems: David Parry, a fellow WordPress advocate, offered several thoughts on what makes WordPress a great course platform and Trent Kays rebelled against Blackboard with Posterous and TinyChat. Ryan Cordell offered several thought-provoking questions about our reasons for these “rebellions” against our university tech systems, and noted that for some of us who are digitally-inclined (myself included) subversive choices in technology become a default behavior . Read more...

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20 avril 2013

Methods for Organizing Your Apps

By Erin E. Templeton. ProfHacker has featured several posts about various mobile apps. See for instance the Open Thread Wednesday dedicated to (y)our Favorite Weather Apps, guest author Ian MacInnes’s post on “Finding the Best iOS App for Annotation and Note-Taking,” and my previous post on GradeBook Pro to name just a few. But once you have all of these apps, what do you do with them? Or how do you organize them so that you can access them quickly and easily? Are you someone who has a dozen different screens that you must weed through on a regular basis? Or do you have a system? I have a system. I adopted it a year or so ago, and it has worked wonders for me. Read more...

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20 avril 2013

Why You Need a Mentor

By Gina Stewart. Do you have a mentor? Not an academic adviser, but a true mentor—someone who has an interest in helping you develop your career path, combined with the seniority and perspective to be helpful. In my opinion, every college student and every professional needs one, and it’s preferable if you don’t report directly to your mentor. A mentor can explain the subtleties of your chosen career path to you, and can help you navigate rough spots along the way. I called my undergraduate mentor when, in my second year of graduate school, I suddenly didn’t have Ph.D. candidacy, even though I had jumped through every hoop successfully. “Sounds like an adviser problem,” my mentor said. “You need to ask your adviser specifically why you didn’t get candidacy, and then you need to ask at least two other professors in the department to be honest with you.”
I followed his advice and found that my adviser had, in fact, sabotaged my candidacy (and as I looked at the professor’s history, I found that he had a very poor record of graduating female Ph.D. candidates). So it was clear that I needed to change advisers. Read more...

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20 avril 2013

Extra-Credit Conundrum

By Eliana Osborn. “Consider offering extra credit for students who attend,” suggests e-mail after e-mail from various entities on campus. Senders are touting art exhibitions, philosophy debates, librarian outreach in the community, guest speakers, forums, and who knows what else. These are great activities that would enrich my students if they attended. I hope they will do things outside of class to be part of the larger community. However, this message of extra credit is in direct opposition to the syllabus and standards that I have been told I must teach from. For developmental English courses, how students are graded is spelled out very strictly at my college. I am only supposed to give credit for tests and writing assignments, with those category weights being dictated by the department. I dislike being managed so much but accept it as part of the job—particularly as an adjunct faculty member. Read more...

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20 avril 2013

Margaret Thatcher’s Legacy Divides British Higher Education

By Thomas Docherty. Often after someone dies who had significant influence over our lives, there is an argument over his or her legacy. In the case of Margaret Thatcher, rarely has the debate been more divisive—and higher education is not immune. Among university colleagues there is argument not just about what her legacy actually is, but about whether professors need to do more to actively reject its influence, which continues to help guide education policy today. Admirers will point to the obvious physical manifestation of her legacy: the University of Buckingham, Britain’s first private university, which opened while Thatcher was minister for education in 1976, and where she served as chancellor for a period starting in 1992. Buckingham’s current vice chancellor, Terence Kealey, praises Thatcher for introducing the sector “to greater accountability and to market forces”. Read more...

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20 avril 2013

Is the International-Education ‘Bubble’ About to Pop?

By Jason Lane and Kevin Kinser. There has been much talk in the United States recently about higher-education “bubbles.” The growing student-loan debt is one, while others point to increasing costs and continued high unemployment as an indicator that higher education writ large is creating a bubble. Closer to our area of study are claims of a possible international-branch-campus bubble. One bubble has gotten less attention and may be on the verge of popping. And if it does, it could have a big impact on academe. Colleges and universities in the United States have become increasingly reliant on international students. According to latest data from the National Center for Education Statistics, international students account for around 10 percent of all graduate enrollments (compared with about 3 percent in undergraduate programs). But a recent report from the Council of Graduate Schools suggests that the pipeline may be starting to dry up. Read more...

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20 avril 2013

Myanmar’s Higher-Education Aspirations

By Paul Smith. Recent stories about a new hope kindling in Burmese colleges and universities are a timely reminder that the restitution of robust higher education is critical to the security and prosperity for a nation emerging from a fractured past and into a more democratic future. Fourteen years ago, I spent a year in Myanmar (also known as Burma), where I experienced firsthand the desperate thirst for knowledge. At the time, the British Council-Rangoon ran the only public library in the country permitted to stock foreign books. In fact, ours were the only published materials that had been allowed to be imported into the country since 1962. The reason why the State Law and Order Restoration Council, or SLORC, which ran the country, had allowed this was to give the sons and daughters of its members access to materials to study for British International General Certificate of Secondary Education exams. Their intent was on successful application to Western universities. Read more...

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20 avril 2013

First Word Problems

By William Germano. My last post was on correspondence closers—those expressions of fidelity and endearment on which the seamless fabric of academia depends. In that post I paused to admire the French use of elaborated closers. At the front end of academic correspondence, however, nobody baroques it up like the Germans. Sehr geehrter Herr Professor Doktor Schmidt is a mouthful, but it’s standard issue in the world of male German academics. We couldn’t easily translate that gesture into English. The honorable Professor Schmidt, who also holds a Ph.D., would just be snark. Even Professor Schmidt, Ph.D., might be fatally misread as sarcasm. But let’s not feel superior to Teutonic stiffness. We’re not so good at negotiating the naming business here in the Anglophone academic world. The terms in which academics address one another, or choose to be addressed, are what I call a first word problem. Read more...

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