By Mary Ellen McIntire. Most students in free online courses don’t spend as much time doing classwork as do traditional college students, but they do log a significant number of hours, according to a new survey of more than 4,500 MOOC students by Class Central, a website that reviews free courses. More...
By Meg Bernhard. Who says Facebook is always a distraction? A new study suggests that if engaged in online debate, college students can use the popular social network to learn and develop a variety of skills. More...
By Meg Bernhard. A new company is jumping into MOOCs, but with a focus on teaching free courses in the arts.
The new virtual art school, called Kadenze, has already teamed up with programs at 18 institutions, including Stanford and Princeton Universities, to create a digital platform designed for arts courses. More...
By George Williams. Here at ProfHacker, we’ve published several posts over the years about the free and open-source Zotero, which is great tool for managing your research. Yesterday, Zotero announced the release of version 4.0.27, with a focus on “streamlined saving, easier bibliography language selection, and more.” It’s not a massive update (as the version number suggests), but it does simplify some of the key functions provided by Zotero. Read more...
By William Germano. The ongoing White House v. Congress struggle has recently involved the charge that one side wants to torpedo the other’s plan. That sounds violent, even metaphorically speaking, but torpedo has a more complicated usage history. More...
By Anne Curzan. A few years ago I stopped referring to my students in my writing. It’s not that I ceased talking about students; I stopped referring to them as mine.
Or at least I try. I am sure I still fall into the phrase my students sometimes in my written work (one of the astute readers of this blog probably will discover that I have done so here on Lingua Franca), and I know that it also happens in my unmonitored speech. More...
By Ben Yagoda. It was a memorable week at the Supreme Court. And the justices handed down some important decisions, too.
The memorability, in my nerdy world, stemmed from a double dose of dissenting opinions from Justice Antonin Scalia, that one-man movement to let the rhetorical freak flag fly. More...
By Ben Yagoda. Sitting on my patio the other day, listening to the birds, sipping a glass of raspberry seltzer, and admiring the contrast of the orange day lilies with the blue and pink hydrangea, I was reminded of Henry James’s remark that “summer afternoon” are the two most beautiful words in the English language. More...
By Ben Yagoda. When I lived in New York City as a young man, I used to like to wander over to Washington Square Park, in Greenwich Village, on summer evenings. What I found there—and what drew me there, it now occurs to me—was virtuosity. More...
By Allan Metcalf. When you take something from one language and put it into another, there’s a word for the activity: translate. It’s a nice carry-across from Latin by way of French, and its components amount to just that: “across” for trans, “carry” for late. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the word to 1300, in a history book known as Cursor Mundi: “This same book it is translated into English tongue to read.” More...
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