By Josh Honn. Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows I routinely rage against LibraryJournal (LJ), a magazine I was auto-subscribed to a few years ago while working toward my MLIS and to which I have yet to figure out how to unsubscribe from. My interaction with LJ is usually limited to me flipping through it after dinner, reading a few choice, rage-worthy quotes from the various columns out loud to my wife, and ultimately flipping the magazine over my head and onto the ground in a ritual we’ve grown quite fond of despite its rage-ful origins. Yet, in recent discussions on Twitter and over email with David Golumbia and others, I’ve come to the realization that I need to engage my rage in greater depth, to do something, anything, to critically complicate the discourse, particularly in library and information science literature. The dominant discourse here, especially when it comes to technology and “openness,” is one not of critique but a blind embrace of utopianism fueled by an acquiescence to inevitability. Read more...

By Liz Reisberg. China is much in the news these days—an article in The NY Times about China’s spectacular $250 billion investment in higher education; the announcement in Inside Higher Ed of $300 million for a Chinese Rhodes Scholarship at Tsinghua (covered also by The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Huffington Post, The Economist, Bloomberg, and more); an opinion piece in The Chronicle about the tensions between foreign-educated scholars and the home-grown variety; the seven words you cannot say in Chinese University classroom. Am I mistaken or is higher education in China covered more in the press than higher education in any other country outside of the US?  Searching “China” on the Insider Higher Ed website brings up mentions in at least 60 articles and opinion pieces since January 1. That seems like a lot. Read more...

Por Ernesto Priego. Es increíble pero fue hace ya un año que tuvo lugar el Primer Encuentro de Humanistas Digitales en la Biblioteca Vasconcelos de la Ciudad de México (17 y 18 de mayo de 2012). Participé remotamente a través de un póster/volante y un sitio titulado “HD/DC” que abrí para ofrecer contexto y referencias. Fue una manera de querer comunicar que en las humanidades digitales es también necesario interrogar la forma en que “practicamos la academia”, es decir, el no poder estar físicamente en un evento en un lugar geográfico en tiempo real no necesariamente significa que no podemos participar en él.
“Disidencia cognitiva” suena grandilocuente e ingenuo, lo sé, pero la intención era sugerir que las “HD” en mi opinión deberían significar no sólo nuevas formas de hacer las cosas sino también nuevas formas de pensarlas. Inspirado por el Día de las Humanidades Digitales y por la próxima escuela de verano de DH Postcolonial he ahora subido mi póster/volante en formato PPT (por lo tanto editable por quien lo baje, si es que acaso interesase) a figshare. Noticia completa...

By Jeb Bush and Randy Best. Rising tuition, declining government subsidies, stagnant endowments, and increased competition are challenging higher education like never before. College and university leaders are struggling to understand where these changes will lead and how they can make higher education more affordable, more accessible, and of greater quality for an increasingly diverse and aspiring student. Based on our interaction with university leaders and policy makers, we believe that the timeline for transformational change has shortened to five years.  During this time, higher education will have moved from a provider-driven model to a consumer-driven one and, in so doing, upend a system that had endured for centuries. Read more...

By Michael P. Ryan. Undergraduate students should join professors in selecting the content of courses taught in the humanities. This is the conclusion I came to after teaching Humanities on Demand: Narratives Gone Viral, a pilot course at Duke University that not only introduced students to some of the critical modes humanists employ to analyze new media artifacts, but also tested the viability of a new, interactive course design. One semester prior to the beginning  of class, we asked 6,500 undergraduates -- in other words, Duke's entire undergraduate student body -- to go online and submit materials they believed warranted examination in the course. Read more...