By G. Rendell. Part of the reason it's so difficult to teach sustainability in colleges and universities is that by the time students arrive on campus they've already fully internalized a lot of unsustainable societal norms. Ironically, one of those is that society, as an entity, doesn't exist. Read more...By G. Rendell. Much of the work I do focuses on making Greenback U's campus operations less wasteful, more efficient, and thus ostensibly more (closer to) sustainable. But like any college or university anywhere in the world, Greenback's ultimate contribution to the eventual fate of society will consist less in what we do than in what we teach. Knowing that, many schools have encouraged -- by various mechanisms -- the development and presentation of specifically sustainability-focused or -related curricular materials. And while explicitly teaching sustainability concepts and techniques is hard to object to, by itself that won't solve any problem. Read more...
By Lee Skallerup Bessette. Dean Dad asked, and I answered. And of course, I got called out for it. I’ve written about the unsustainable economics of getting a PhD and becoming an academic in the past; you can read all about it here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here. Katherine D. Harris has recently blogged her financial reality of being a tenured professor (and of course opened herself up to criticisms about how she spends her money and free time). Increasingly, people are citing financial reasons for passing on an academic career. Read more...By Lee Skallerup Bessette. Last week, I was in Lincoln, Nebraska for the annual international Digital Humanities conference. I presented and that went really well. We were placed on a panel with Willard McCarty, who also happened to be the Busa Award winner (in other words, a pretty big deal). He talked about the difficulties of being truly interdisciplinary during our panel and the importance of knowing the history of DH in his keynote address. Read more...
By Herman Berliner. My younger daughter was fine in England. We loved being there. The accent was strange to her but people were talking English and she had no trouble communicating. Communicating was not a problem for me either and I was also smart enough not to drive a car and adjust to driving on the "wrong" side of the street. We next took a side trip to Disneyland Paris. English was in frequent use and almost everyone understood and was willing to talk in English. Some of the rides and shows were primarily French but there was always an English version, even if it was abridged. Once again my younger daughter had no trouble understanding or being understood, especially since many of the rides were simply irresistible and required very limited communication skills. Read more...
ByJohn Warner. Twice in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been reading the news and had the sudden realization that my students have been indoctrinating me. The most recent example occurred when I was reading about a new documentary film about the practices at SeaWorld called Blackfish. As I read the summary of the tale of Tilikum, the SeaWorld orca that killed one of his trainers in 2010, the details of his capture and imprisonment, his life of distress that some argue turned to actual psychosis, I nodded in agreement to the argument that Sea World should be compelled to cease the displaying of orcas. Read more...
By Kris Olds. Our European MOOCs in Global Context Workshop (19-20 June 2013 @ UW-Madison) went very well, in my biased opinion. The event was kicked off by a provocative and well-crafted keynote lecture by George Siemens of Athabasca University. As I noted in the workshop webpage. Read more...
By Liz Reisberg. There is little that stresses me more than preparing to teach or give a talk in a country where I am not familiar with the culture. I have been doing research on higher education in Argentina for almost 25 years. I know quite a bit about the history of education, reforms during recent decades, how the system is structured, attitudes about teaching and learning, etc. I have a pretty good feel for the controversies, issues being debated, and challenges faced by most universities. All of this helps me to plan my work better and target themes appropriately. I also know what issues I can joke about and which ones I dare not. Read more...
By Barbara Fister. Funny how sometimes you read an article and it feels like a smack on the forehead. Of course! Why didn’t I think of that before? Usually that means you had thought of it before, in vague, inchoate terms, but somebody else has put it into words. Bam. That’s what happened when I read the preprint of an article by Wendy Holliday and Jim Rogers in portal: Libraries and the Academy titled “Talking About Information Literacy: The Mediating Role of Discourse in a College Writing Classroom.” Read more...By Barbara Fister. Today I found myself revisiting a blog post by Doug Armato of the University of Minnesota Press just as my Twitter stream was responding to the American Historical Society's new statement on why historians’ dissertations must be protected from the public eye. Mark Sample remembered it and posted it to Twitter. Public streams of thought have these eddies and undercurrents that sweep back and bring up things from the past to bob along in the onward rush of ideas. Which is, itself, something of an example of what Doug Armato was describing as the way scholarship works today. Read more.../https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
