By Geoffrey Pullum. I promised last week that I would discuss three developments that turned almost-useless language-connected technological capabilities into something seriously useful. The one I want to introduce first was introduced by Google toward the end of the 1990s, and it changed our whole lives, largely eliminating the need for having full sentences parsed and translated into database query language. The hunch that the founders of Google bet on was that simple keyword search could be made vastly more useful by taking the entire set of pages containing all of the list of search words and not just returning it as the result but rather ranking its members by influentiality and showing the most influential first. What a page contains is not the only relevant thing about it: As with any academic publication, who values it and refers to it is also important. And that is (at least to some extent) revealed in the link structure of the Web. Read more...

By William Pannapacker. What teaching colleges and research universities have to gain from collaboration. As academics we can be too snug in our institutional silos. We sometimes think of one another as competitors for students, and as a result we duplicate scarce resources in mutually damaging ways. Without more coordinated programs, will we go on teaching the way we have since the Industrial Revolution? Will our students, knowing it doesn't have to be that way and worried about their future, lose patience with us?
The digital humanities (or, preferably, the more inclusive digital liberal arts) provides a context for facing those questions head-on. I have written several essays extolling the value of digital approaches as a means of transforming undergraduate education. Read more...

By Dennis M. Barden. Top 10 missteps that backfire on administrative search committees.
As search consultants, my colleagues and I regularly observe candidates doing counterproductive things during a preliminary (yes, I mean "airport") interview, in the mistaken belief that they are scoring points with the hiring committee. But search committee have their own set of gaffes.
Last week's column focused on the 10 most common missteps made by would-be presidents, provosts, and deans. In the spirit of turnabout being fair play—and with continuing props to David Letterman as master of the form—I offer here the top 10 things that search-committee members do (or don't do) in interviews that backfire.  
10. Don't understand the job. Ironically, this happens all the time. Read more...

By Steve Kolowich. In the latest salvo in a debate over MOOCs that has drawn national attention, the San Jose State University chapter of the California Faculty Association has thrown its weight behind recent criticisms of the university's partnerships with outside providers of massive open online courses—specifically, edX and Udacity.
Meantime, on the opposite side of the country, American University has announced a "moratorium on MOOCs."
The California faculty union, which represents more than 2,000 professors on the San Jose State campus, has written a memorandum sharply criticizing the university's president, Mohammad H. Qayoumi, for what the union sees as a preference for "private rather than public solutions" when it comes to online tools and content. Read more...

By Jake New. Later this month, Michael Schatz, a physics professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, will begin teaching a massive open online physics course through Coursera. Because of the complexity of physics and because the course uses computer modeling, students taking the MOOC will need access to something that doesn't often come with a free online course: an expensive textbook.
"This is an intro course," Mr. Schatz said. "The idea is this is a person's first course in physics. Textbook usage is a common feature of such courses. They play a central role. Without the book, this course is kind of a nonstarter."
But that textbook, which is called Matter and Interactions and is published by John Wiley & Sons, can cost more than $150. With many participants enrolling in MOOCs as a way to learn while saving money, how to bring high-quality, mainstream textbooks into a service that is meant to be free, or at least inexpensive, remains a puzzle. Read more...