By Joshua Kim. I’d like to have a discussion about analytics. About data. About assessment.
My colleague calls this technique writing for collaboration.
Some questions:
By Joshua Kim. "Be reassured: the literature student has learned to inquire, to question, to interpret, to critique, to compare, to research, to argue, to sift, to analyze, to shape, to express. His intellect can be put to broad use."
From a LOR (letter of recommendation) from J.T. Fitger, Professor of English and Creative Writing, Payne University.
Quoted in Dear Committee Members: A novel (Kindle Location 974 - whatever that means). Read more...
By Hanna Peacock. The question isn’t if your hard drive will fail; it’s when will your hard drive fail. The stats on hard drive survival reveal a harsh truth: 1-in-20 drives die within the first year; 1-in-5 die within four years; half of all hard drives die within 6 years. Besides the natural death of a hard drive (or flash drive), viruses, thefts, spilled beverages, and power surges can cause a catastrophic data loss. But, if you follow the 3-2-1 Rule of Backup, you are prepared to save your data, writing, family photos, and personal files in the event of a digital emergency.
The 3-2-1 Rule states that you should have:
- Three copies of your files,
- In two different formats, and
- One copy should be offsite. Read more...
By Kelly Hanson. Beginning the semester can feel like a fresh start for those of us who weren’t quite as productive as we wanted to be this summer. But it can also feel overwhelming—so many things to do and to schedule. When and where and how to get research and writing done? Writing every day and making a daily/weekly schedule are both important facets of productive writing. Read more...
By Matt Reed. This time of year, as students are looking for that last section that makes a section perfect, I start hearing requests for waitlists. Wouldn’t it be great, they ask, if popular sections had formal waitlists, so students wouldn’t have to check the computer obsessively to see if someone dropped?
If you only look at the single, isolated case, the question makes sense. Read more...
By Matt Reed. Libby Nelson has a thought-provoking piece in Vox about why textbook prices keep climbing so quickly. It’s worth a read, not least for the point that, as with tuition, prices do not necessarily equal spending. As prices have climbed progressively higher, students have become more vigilant about finding alternatives, whether through rentals, used purchases online, or other, more ethically ambiguous means. Read more...
By Matt Reed. Quick: what will be the hot growth field in five to ten years?
The only honest answer I can imagine for that is “I don’t know.”
Some guesses are better than others, of course. I don’t see travel agents or mail carriers making huge comebacks, and it’s probably safe to guess that certain sorts of IT will be hot. In different areas of the country, locally hot companies and industries may be easy to predict. But on any sort of large scale, the pathway into the middle class is probably more opaque and rapidly changing now than it has been in generations. Read more...
By Matt Reed. As regular readers know, I’ve given California a hard time over the last few years. Some of its rules around structure and funding of community colleges strike me as perverse, poorly thought out, and doomed to fail. I stand by those judgments. But even California is capable of getting one right. This week it announced the creation of a $50 million “innovation fund” for public higher education. Read more...
An article called "So you want to date a teaching assistant" has set off a furor at Western University, in Ontario. The article appeared in the special issue of The Gazette, the student newspaper, for new students. The piece described strategies such as Facebook stalking, dressing to attract T.A. attention, office hours visits, and so forth. Reaction has been intense -- most of it negative. The union that represents T.A.s at Western posted a response saying that the piece had essentially been "a guide on how to sexually harass another human being." The provost wrote a letter to the editor in which she said: "Not only does the spirit of the article run contrary to Western’s efforts to have a workplace and learning environment that is free from sexual harassment, it is disrespectful of the essential contribution graduate teaching assistants make to Western’s academic mission." Read more...
The National Association for College Admission Counseling has released draft proposed additions to its Statement of Principles of Good Practice that would expand on last year’s change permitting member universities to use commission-based agents in international student recruiting if they ensure accountability, integrity and transparency. The proposed additions, to be considered by the NACAC Assembly at the annual conference in late September, would flesh out those terms. Read more...
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