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By Matt Reed. Every so often, when watching something on tv, I’ll sort of recognize an actor.  I’ll know it’s someone I’ve seen before, but won’t be able to place where. I’ve been known to lose entire evenings trying to figure out who it is.  That feeling of knowing that I know, but being unable to call up the specifics, is a special kind of frustration. It happens with actors, songs, or even famous quotations in unfamiliar contexts. Shazam and Google sometimes help, but I try not to resort to them too quickly.  It feels like cheating. Read more...

By Matt Reed. In a discussion recently about the demographics of our online students, I realized that I’m not entirely sure what an online student is.  We have students in each of the following groups:

• Students who take nothing but entirely online classes
• Students who take most classes online, but who come to campus for a few
• Students who take most of their classes on campus, but who regularly take one or two classes online to make their schedules cleaner
• Students who take “hybrid” classes (also called “brick and click” or “surf and turf”) in which some of the regular class meetings are held (or replaced by other activities) online
• Students who take traditional classes that have fairly robust online materials, and who have to work with/through our LMS in the course of what they’re doing. Read more...

By Susan O'Doherty. In 2006, I was working at a job I thought I would keep until I retired. I loved what I did. I was the assistant director of a psychotherapy center that helped crime victims, and I was responsible for supervising a staff of gifted and dedicated therapists and for introducing traumatized clients to the process of therapy. It was stressful but highly rewarding work, until the social service agency that oversaw our center decided that there was more money to be made out of us, and brought in a consultant to do an efficiency analysis. The result was that the center's executive director, the clinical director and I were all let go, and the therapists, who had been on salary, were changed to fee-for-service, which meant that they got paid only if the client showed up. Read more...

By Rosemarie Emanuele. Labor Economics talks about a type of unemployment in which the jobs available are not the jobs that workers are looking for. This “mismatch” can occur because of geographical issues (as when the jobs are in California but the unemployed workers are in New York), or because of other issues. One such reason might be a mismatch in the skills possessed by workers and the skills desired by employers in search of employees. I found myself thinking of this recently when I read an article about a new type of high school that has captured some people’s attention, including the attention of the President of the United States. Read more...

By Barbara Fister. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof lit up Twitter and prompted some thoughtful blog posts here when he wrote “Professors: We Need You!”, urging scholars to stop writing such obscure and tedious stuff for each other and become public intellectuals. I am partly sympathetic to his message. There are a lot of ways public policy could be better informed by the research conducted in our universities, and I’m rather boringly fixated on open access to knowledge as a way of sharing knowledge outside our gated communities. Read more...

By Tracy Mitrano. anuary 28-February 28 is National Privacy Month.  I don’t know who coined the phrase or anointed the dates (whoever does anyway?) but let’s take full advantage to explore some developments. We start out with today’s NYT piece about what’s behind the LED lights at Newark International Airport. Read more...