By William Germano. You will recognize the first name as that of one of our greatest novelists, known privately as Mary Ann Evans, author of the immensely satisfying Middlemarch as well as things you were forced to read in high school, like Silas Marner. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. One of the commenters on “Dumb Copy Editing Survives” last week said something that worried me. My topic was the contrast between sentences of the sort seen in [1a] and [1b] (I prefix [1b] with an asterisk to indicate that it is ungrammatical):
| [1] | a. | We are none of us native or purebred. |
| b. | *We are, none of us, native or purebred. |
What the commenter said was: “If I read the erroneous version, I would have still taken away the exact same meaning. I’d just think there were too many commas.”
This worries me because it seems to miss the crucial distinction between contexts where comma use is a free choice and contexts where there is a firm rule. More...
By Ben Yagoda. The phone buzzed on a sunny fall day as I was taking a stroll on the beautiful campus of Swarthmore College, near my home. I looked at the number—it had New York’s 212 area code, but otherwise I didn’t recognize it. I took a chance that it wasn’t a robo call and answered it. More...
By Lucy Ferriss. I didn’t plan to write a follow-up to my spelling-contest post, but reader response prompted too many thoughts to contain in a footnote. More...
By Casey Fabris. The system lets students choose their own path through a course, selecting the assignments that interest and challenge them. At its heart is a tool, called the “grade predictor,” that helps to “manage some of the chaos” of such a personalized system. The grade predictor also helps students figure out what they need to do to reach the classroom goals they set for themselves. More...
By Casey Fabris. The University of California at Irvine plans to offer a four-week MOOC based on the FX television series The Strain, which follows the spread of a disease with the “hallmarks of an ancient and evil strain of vampirism.” The course, “Fight or Die: The Science Behind FX’s The Strain,” will be hosted on Instructure’s MOOC platform Canvas Network. More...
By Jeffrey R. Young. Four liberal-arts colleges on Monday formed a consortium to share information about their experiments with online education, and more members may soon join in.
The focus is not on bringing down the cost of education, but on improving online-teaching projects — whether all-online or hybrid courses — by sharing experiences and collaborating. More...
By Peter Schmidt. More than 60 Asian-American groups have accused Harvard University of discriminating against applicants for their ethnic backgrounds in complaints filed with the Justice Department and the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. More...
By Ian Wilhelm. Walid Raad, an artist and associate professor at the Cooper Union, says he was barred from entering the United Arab Emirates this week for “security” reasons, according to a letter he posted online on Friday.
It is the second time an academic has been banned from entering the country in recent months. More...
By Andy Thomason. Hazing is a common occurrence in marching-band programs across the country, according to the results of a new study published in the Journal of Research in Music Education. The study found that almost one-third of the more than 1,200 undergraduates surveyed said they had observed hazing in their band programs. More...
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