By Brian Mathews. I enjoy seeing social media used in classrooms. We’re definitely in the next wave now with many faculty members expressing excitement about these tools. Several years ago the conversations I had were: “that’s interesting but it just doesn’t work for my needs” and today it is: “I want to foster more interaction and I think this app might work, what do you think?” I recently stumbled upon a Twitter instance here at Virginia Tech via the College of Natural Resources and Environment. They integrated Twitter into their First-Year Experience program. Here is some documentation. More...

By Robert Talbert. Week 1 of the new semester is in the books, and with it the first week of the inverted calculus class. I am teaching two sections of this class, one that meets Monday/Wednesday/Friday and the other Tuesday/Thursday. It makes for tricky scheduling, but as I learned this week it also gives an opportunity for second chances, which is important if you don’t always get the in-class portion of the flipped classroom right. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. Strand Palace Hotel, London, England — I’m in the heart of London for a few days attending a British Academy conference headlined “The Cognitive Revolution 60 Years On.” The cognitive revolution we are supposed to be reflecting on was not specified, but no linguist would be in any doubt about it: They mean the one that Noam Chomsky is commonly held to have started by introducing bold claims about psychology and philosophy into American linguistics. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. Many months ago, I celebrated what I still call the subjunctive mood. Now I’m going to rant. We needn’t call it the subjunctive. Let’s call it contrary-to-fact expressions, or contrafactuals. We all know that the language has evolved to render the previously standard verb form in these expressions almost obsolete. More...

By Rebecca Schuman. Margaret Mary Vojtko, a veteran instructor of French at Duquesne University, died broke and humiliated on her front lawn this month. Last week her friend Daniel Kovalik memorialized her in a wrenching op-ed essay, and for the first time Americans outside academe began to notice, en masse, adjunct faculty in the United States, who now make up a majority of college instructors. More...