Formation Continue du Supérieur

By John Warner. I despair. 
As reported by Michael D. Shear at the New York Times, Obama administration deputy undersecretary for education Jamienne Studley told a group of college presidents that when it comes to evaluating colleges, “It’s like rating a blender.” 
I despair because apparently Jamienne Studley is an important person in directing federal higher education policy. Read more...

By Barbara Fister. I’ve been meaning to read the New York Times’s Innovation Report, the one that was leaked to Buzzfeed just as its first woman editor was being fired. (I don’t know enough about the circumstances of that change in editorial leadership to comment on its wisdom, but the public humiliation of Jill Abramson was excruciating to watch and not befitting the dignity of a major newspaper.)  Yesterday, Joshua Kim reminded me of my intention. After all, it's called, by the Neiman Journalism Lab, “one of the key documents of this media age.” Read more...

By Oronte. Tim Peters was a Fulbright fellow in Argentina in 2009. His work has appeared in The Point magazine, the Chicago Reader, the Review of Contemporary Fiction, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. His work has appeared at the blog before, most recently here and here Read more...

By Philip G. Altbach - The World View. This blog is not about awarding credit for academic work. Rather it concerns assigning author credit to reports that are published by many organizations. My comments relate to the field of higher education, although the situation is common in many areas. Of course, when a person does research or analysis and publishes the work in a journal or a book, he or she is listed as the author. Frequently, when work is done at the request of an organization, government agency, or private firm, and published for public distribution, no author or editor is listed. The situation varies and there seems to be no norm. I am not arguing that organizations are conspiring to withhold recognition — rather, I suspect, longstanding institutional cultures may be responsible. Read more...

By G. Rendell. For several years now, I've worked with a few self-selected faculty members at Greenback U to create and administer undergraduate research projects.  Most of those projects have been conducted within the constraints of semester-long courses, and most of them have focused student attention on some aspect either of Greenback's campus or of the surrounding Backboro community.  Practicalities (time, money, travel, etc.) mitigate in favor of research that can be conducted locally and, to be honest, emphasizing the local nature of sustainability challenges and solutions is part of my agenda. Read more...

By Rosemarie Emanuele. When the Academy Award winning song “Let it Go” sings about snowflakes as “frozen fractals”, it is calling to mind a mathematical concept closely linked to the idea of “chaos”. I found myself thinking of the idea of chaos this past week, as things seemed to get lost on an almost daily basis, and I felt that I could not seem to regain control over the minutia of my life. Read more...

By Laura Tropp. When I wanted to play as a child, I simply headed out the front door, rang the bell of a neighbor, and we would start a kickball game. Today, in order for my child to play with a friend, play dates have to be arranged. When did playing become so scheduled?  Has the drop-in play date disappeared? Is it because children’s time is over-planned? Are families too busy? Or is it that we are so used to mediated technology that showing up unannounced is simply not done anymore. Read more...

By Eric Stoller. Before I became an acolyte for a certain "fruit company," I was a PC/Windows guy. One of my first summer jobs involved doing work with a computer that was running Windows 3.1. When my parents purchased a desktop computer with Windows 95 (a replacement for our Commodore 64), I spent hours playing games, digging around the file system, and "surfed (crawled)" the Internet via a 14.4 modem. The high school library had a computer lab in it that featured Apple computers. I wasn't interested. Windows was what I knew. More...

By Kelly Hanson. Summer is upon us here in Southern Indiana, and in between barbeques and long weekend bike rides, I have some epic plans for my dissertation this summer. The trouble? The lack of semesterly structure makes me feel like I am untethered. Summer, for me, is one of the most difficult times to write. My summer productivity has been hit or miss in the past. But this summer, I am ready to get this chapter done. Read more...

By Laura B. McGrath. I get nostalgic as summer arrives each year; I remember neglecting my homework to go play outside, so excited for the lawn sprinkler. And when school was finally over, well, life just couldn’t get better. In my rose-colored memory, my summers looked a lot like The Sandlot and Troop Beverly Hills (I neither played baseball nor scouted, but I have an active imagination). Read more...