By Joshua Kim. Lots of great discussion and debate around the Carroll and Felician faculty layoffs.
The comments largely fell along two lines of analysis:
Argument 1: The schools were operating under a set of economic imperatives that drove the layoffs. Therefore the actions are more understandable, if poorly handled, as higher ed is not immune from the laws revenues and costs. Read more...
By Eric Stoller. This post might get under your skin. It might provoke you a little bit. If you feel your hackles rising, my apologies. This post is not an indictment of all Student Affairs graduate students. There are many amazing scholars within #SAgrad programs. For the record, I'm mostly referring to our masters level students with this post. #SAgrad students, for the most part, are competent researchers and writers. However, I get an alarmingly high number of inquiries via email from our graduate students that are rife with issues that cause me to take countless amounts of umbrage. Read more...
By Liz Timbs. I miss teaching. Last year, I worked as a teaching assistant for two traditional courses and one online course. In many ways, I am very lucky to not have to teach this year; I have more time to work on my language training and personal research. But I still miss teaching. So much so that for one of my seminar projects, I am developing an online course. This has caused me to reflect a lot on the skills necessary for effective online teaching. The word that keeps coming up is communication. As there is virtually no face-to-face contact with students in online courses, communication with students through comments and emails are absolutely vital to both students’ and the course’s success. Below are some (more) strategies to effectively communicate with students in an online course. Read more...
By Andrea Zellner. I have been teaching online in some fashion since 2008, and in the course of that time I have learned a thing or two about dealing with the difficult student. Before we go on, however, I want to note that if a student is behaving in a threatening manner, you need to immediately contact your college or university and allow professionals to deal with such conduct. It is important that threatening or abusive behavior be dealt with immediately and by a full team of professionals at your institution. Now, back to the difficult student. Read more...
By Bridget Gelms. I love a good Breaking Bad gif. So when one of my students used one during a research activity, I couldn’t help but publicly nerd out a little. This happened on a day when my students used Storify to cull information related to their research projects. Here at GradHacker, we’ve previously highlighted digital technologies that can be used in our teaching, like GoogleDocs and WordPress. Another tool you may want on your radar this semester is Storify. Read more...
By Natascha Chtena. Social media is like teen sex. Everyone wants to do it. No one actually knows how. When finally done, there is surprise its not better. - Avinash Kaushik.
Add “integration in the classroom” after social media in the above quote, and you get an observation that’s at least as biting, funny, and accurate as the original. Don’t get me wrong--I do believe there’s something unique and perhaps even remarkable to be leveraged from tools like Twitter when used in conjunction with traditional courses. But after spending a quarter experimenting with Twitter in the German language course I teach at UCLA, I feel we’re still a long way from a definite “cookbook” or a set of ultimate best practices that make sense in different classrooms around the world. The past three months have been challenging, but they have also been eye-opening. They taught me many things I intend to apply to the course I’m going be teaching next quarter. Read more...
By Matt Reed. What’s a thought leader? And how do you know one when you see one? By Matt Reed. Every so often you hear something in a meeting that makes you stop short, because it so neatly encapsulates a difficult truth. That happened yesterday. Someone who works here mentioned that her job is to “talk students out of Nursing.” By Matt Reed. The Department of Obvious Studies has been working overtime. Last week, it issued a report showing that despite much of our political rhetoric, students are, in fact, different from each other. This week, it issued a report showing that students whose transfer credits are denied are less likely to finish a degree on time than students who don’t have to retake (and pay for) courses they’ve already taken. Apparently, when a college puts up high barriers to completion, completion rates drop. It’s almost as if barriers somehow get in the way. Read more...
By Tracy Mitrano. This week was rich with Internet privacy ironies. First, we had Edward Snowden and Eric Schmidt at South by Southwest, each talking about privacy, and then Mark Zuckerberg phoning Obama, who was recently profiled in The New Yorker, to complain about the N.S.A. Read more.../https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
