Linguistics qua Affliction
Egli me riprese il braccio,
e continuammo il cammino.
- Queste cantine – osservò – sono molto estese.
- I Montresor – gli risposi – sono una grande e numerosa famiglia.
- Com’è il vostro emblema? – L’ho dimenticato …
- E il motto?
- Nemo me impune lacessit.
- Bello! – concluse lui.
Nei suoi occhi scintillava il vino. Read more...
Auto-Corrected
In less than five minutes, the student wrote back. “Apologies, Prof. It wasn’t me but A-C. I really meant ‘spared’.” And she added: “It won’t happy again.”
This time I just smiled. Read more...
Perfect!
Hello!
Most greetings, in English or other languages, involve respect (Sir), the day (Good morning), health (How do you do, Howdy), or the like. Informally nowadays we say Hey or Hi, which might be condensations of How are you. Read more...
Breaking Down Barriers Between the Humanities and the Sciences
By Leslie Niiro. When I graduate from Duke University with a liberal-arts degree (hopefully of my own design), I will never have taken a physics class where I mastered Gaussian surfaces. I won’t have studied dehydrohalogenation of alkyl halides in organic chemistry or the life cycle of Lycopodium in biology. Even after looking up these terms in Wikipedia, I doubt I’ll remember what they mean by the time this post is published. More...
Interdisciplinary Research and Critical Friends
By Elizabeth Pitts. A couple of years ago, Lila McDowell wrote a piece for The Chronicle that described “critical friends” as an essential part of managing the division inherent in interdisciplinary research. Critical friends, she wrote, are the people who challenge us to reconceptualize the obvious—the colleagues and mentors we rely on most, the ones who pay us the courtesy of letting us know when our writing is fuzzy or our arguments are weak. I’ve remembered this phrase during recent discussions in Professor Davidson’s MOOC on the history and future of higher education. More...
A Practical Guide for Institutional Change
By Matthew Clark. This week in “History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education,” we’re discussing the topic of institutional change. Specifically, we’re considering key strategies that will help us make important changes at colleges and universities. As we consider the development of our own strategies, Professor Davidson encourages us to “make alliances with other change makers” and “take change personally.” Along these lines, I would like to provide a brief practical guide to how those suggestions might be carried out. More...
Getting in the MOOC
By Gregory Karp. Massive open online classes offer enrichment during down time, and the ROI is better than TV. Free entertainment online is nothing new, but what if you could access a form of entertainment and enrichment over the Internet that others pay thousands of dollars for and that keeps you occupied for weeks at a time?
That's one of the allures of MOOCs — massive open online classes. They're college classes taught online, some by the world's leading experts in their fields at famous universities. More...
Black Students at Harvard Speak Out Through Photo Campaign
By Vincent DeFrancesco. A photo campaign called “I, Too, Am Harvard” is causing a commotion on the Ivy League campus. The campaign, inspired by a play of the same name that will have its premiere on March 7, highlights “the faces and voices of black students at Harvard College,” according to the project’s Tumblr page. More...