By Prof. Hacker. Recent announcements are showing a trend in cheaper storage solutions and cloud backups. Google recently updated its pricing for Drive storage and now offers 15 GB for free and incredibly cheap prices for 100 GB, 1 TB, and 10TB+. At WWDC, Apple announced changes to its iCloud service towards a more Dropbox-like experience and revealed a new pricing model that includes a baseline 20 GB for $0.99 per month. And just this week, Amazon revealed its plans for unlimited storage for photographs for those purchasing the new Fire Phone. Cloud storage, it seems, is everywhere and dirt cheap. More...
On Deadlines
By Natalie Houston. Some hard (and sometimes hard-won) truths about deadlines, academic and otherwise:
Some deadlines are really, truly, firm. And some are not.
Some deadlines come with negative consequences for not meeting them in a timely fashion. Some do not.
Some negative consequences take physical or visible forms, such as late fees, delayed diplomas, or cancelled accounts. Some negative consequences are psychological and emotional, such as feelings of embarrassment, guilt, or shame.
Deadlines and their flexibility are, like other resources, typically unevenly distributed (within an organization, within a profession, within the world more broadly). This means that some people have more ability to renegotiate a deadline than others do. More...
Survey on Digital Games Use in the Classroom
By Anastasia Salter. A survey of grade school educators on using games in the classroom was recently released by the Games and Learning Publishing Council (funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation). While this survey isn’t directly applicable to those of us working in higher education, the adoption and success of games methods in K-12 will impact responses to those approaches when we try them in our classes with those students years later. More...
Tools for Transitions: Finding A New Home
By Anastasia Salter. For most of us in academia, big transitions are inevitable. We move from graduate school in one state to a postdoc or fellowship in another and perhaps through several such temporary positions in search of permanence. And, even if found, permanence can be an illusion as needs of departments, family ties, and other life considerations get in the way. I’m in the midst of a big transition this summer: I’m relocating to Orlando for a new job at the University of Central Florida. So as I navigate the hurdles of a big move, I’ll be writing a series of posts here on the tools and tech I’ve found to make the process a bit more manageable. More...
Like as the Waves Make Towards the Pebbled Shore
By Allan Metcalf. Whoa, that’s Shakespeare. (Sonnet 60.) But it’s the best description I know of the verse form invented by his contemporary Edmund Spenser for The Fairy Queen, a marathon of a poem set in an allegorical Fairyland full of “fierce wars and faithful loves” (in Spenser’s words) and populated by believable characters. If you get the olde fashyonde spelyng out of the way, and concentrate on the story rather than the complicated allegory, as I have argued in two previous posts, you’ll have an amazing journey through its more than 30,000 lines arranged in 3,500 stanzas. More...
A Victory Over Genericide
By Lucy Ferriss. The New York Times has begun a strange new series titled “Verbatim,” mini-docudramas culled from transcripts of court documents. In its inaugural video, the punch line kicks in when the office worker being relentlessly grilled about the presence of a photocopy machine in his office is finally badgered into admitting that a machine exists from which he extracts copies of documents. What is that machine called? “Xerox,” he answers desperately. More...
List With Legs
By Ben Yagoda. In March 2013, I wrote a short article for an online publication called The Week. Following the current mode, I composed it in the form of a list: “7 Bogus Grammar ‘Errors’ You Don’t Need to Worry About.” I explained why the following “rules” are no longer supportable, if they ever were. More...
The True Secret of Office Packing
By Geoffrey Pullum. My all-time favorite Chronicle article, “Yagoda’s Unfamiliar Quotations” (mentioned here once before, in The Case of the Extra Word), is a reminiscence about a collection of unquoted quotables—memorable remarks by ordinary folk who never got famous. More...
Middle-Class Calif. Students Will Get Hundreds of Dollars in Tuition Grants
By Andy Thomason. Students from middle-class families in the University of California and California State University systems will find out within the next several weeks whether they will have hundreds of dollars chopped off their tuition bills with grants in the coming academic year. More...
Senate Votes, 95 to 3, in Favor of Job-Training Legislation
By Andy Thomason. The U.S. Senate passed the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, which would streamline federal job-training programs, by a vote of 95 to 3 on Wednesday. The bill now moves to the House of Representatives. The legislation would reauthorize the Workforce Investment Act, which was enacted in 1998 and was due for reauthorization in 2003 but still awaits that step. More...