By Matt Reed. Nerdiest lede ever: Is interdisciplinarity becoming a class prerogative?
January term had a distinct feel at my small liberal arts college. In that residential setting, intersession was a time for unusual, interdisciplinary, or otherwise unusual classes. My favorite was a class on Gay and Lesbian Politics, which I took in the late 80’s. Read more...
By Matt Reed. One night in my freshman year of college, several of us were hanging out in a dorm room. We had the stereo tuned to the campus radio station, and we were doing the urgent/overlapping conversation thing that happens at that age. At a pause in the discussion, one of my friends said, from out of nowhere, that I should be on the radio. Read more...
By Shira Lurie. No matter what field you’re in, grad school will at some point demand a piece of writing from you. Kelly has provided an excellent “taxonomy," from dissertations to emails, that makes clear that the ability to write well is important to grad school success. With this in mind, I am offering a follow-up to Kelly’s post with some tips for improving your writing. Many of these are things we’ve learned in grade school, but have forgotten over time. More...
By Natascha Chtena. If you’d told me a year ago I’d be writing this post, I would have told you to adjust your meds. But as of today, I’ve lived without home Internet for exactly six months. It wasn’t a planned detox; before going cold turkey, I wouldn’t have thought that doing a PhD without being constantly connected was possible. I even remember questioning the honesty of a friend, who happens to be an engineering PhD, and who, quite some time ago, mentioned that he’s living without an internet connection at home. More...
By Joshua Kim. The NYTimes is getting it right with The Uphshot.
Who needs Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight when we can get “news analysis, data visualizations, commentary and historical context” from the staff of the NYTimes? (Actually, FiveThirtyEight and Nate Silver are still pretty great). Read more...
By Joshua Kim. Austin Carr has a great article on The Real Story Behind Jeff Bezos’s Fire Phone Debacle And What It Means For Amazon’s Future in Fast Company.
Why has the Fire Phone been such a disaster? Carr reports that Bezos modeled his behaviors around the phone design on Steve Jobs. Every decision about the phone’s design went through Bezos. Read more...
By Joshua Kim. We have an edtech space problem. Our work, if you work at the intersection of learning and technology, increasingly resembles that of a tech startup. The spaces that we work are, however, unlikely to have been designed around how we work today. Edtech work patterns and edtech work rhythms have left our legacy office designs behind. Read more...
By Joshua Kim. Badging in higher ed is one of those topics where my understanding falls short of my curiosity. It is for this reason that I asked my colleagues Mike Goudzwaard and Michael Evans if they would be willing to write a guest post on some of the issues around badging that our IHE community should be discussing. Mike G. is an Instructional Designer and Michael E. is a Neukom Fellow in the Neukom Institute for Computational Science, and together they are leading the discussion of digital badging our institution. Read more...
By Joshua Kim. The most important higher education story of 2015 will, ironically, be a story published at the end of 2014. This is the 12/26 NYT’s story by Richard Prichard Pérez-Peña Colleges Reinvent Classes to Keep More Students in Science. Read more...
By John Warner. Just before Christmas, as I read the news of “outrage” over Brandeis student Khadijah Lynch’s Tweets in the aftermath of the assassination of two New York City police officers, I thought of James Baldwin. Read more...
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