By Ilan Stavans. At Amherst College, where I’ve taught for more 20 years (oy, gevalt!), a couple of years ago a tenure case was brought down in part because of the word “solid.” I’ve put it in quote marks in part because tenure cases are multiheaded monsters: Their rise or fall as a result of countless factors. In this particular one, one of the factors—and, ultimately, a stumbling block—was this much-contested word. More...
By Allan Metcalf. This week in his superb, extraordinary, unparalleled, remarkable Lingua Franca post on the “tenure code” (I hope I’ve included enough superlatives to properly sustain his reputation at Amherst), Ilan Stavans wrote, “What I don’t know, where I’m in the dark (as other outside reviewers surely are, too), is in regards to particular institutional codes.”
When a usage change occurs in such a highly regarded platform as Lingua Franca, it deserves a second look. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. The sports section of the The Guardian last week carried an article by Jamie Jackson about developments in the Manchester United soccer team, where a number of players are apparently not sure they will stay. The article cited the opinions of one player who is probably not coming back from Fiorentina, where he is currently on loan; and then it continued with this shockingly uninformative sentence. More...
By Lucy Ferriss. I’ll be taking a work-intensive book leave from Lingua Franca beginning next week. Just before I return, I’ll be relaxing for a week in Tuscany, where we chose a villa based on the reviews. The negative reviews, that is, the ones that said, “Wi-Fi here is really terrible.” Yes. More...
By David Dulceany. In one of the videos this week for the MOOC History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education, there is a discussion of the iPod experiment, where, in 2003, students at Duke received free iPods and were challenged to use them in innovative ways for educational purposes. The video introduces the idea of how the “i” in “iPod” is a reference to the Cartesian cogito ergo sum, or “I think, therefore I am.”
With this in mind, I began to think how this “i” ties the users of the product and other iProducts to a personal identification with consumerist culture, making them into iConsumers. More...
By Jade E. Davis. On Sunday I received an email from Coursera letting me know that the Signature Track was now available for Cathy Davidson’s MOOC, “History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education.” I felt myself tense up a little. The Signature Track, for those who aren’t familiar with it, uses multiple forms of authentication (government-issued photo ID, webcam, credit card) to verify that people taking a course are who they say they are. The signature component of the verification is a biometric technique. More...
By . Wake Technical Community College, in Raleigh, N.C., has been staffed by “instructors” since its founding, in 1958, according to the News & Observer. That changed on Thursday as the institution promoted about a third of its faculty members to “professor” status. Read more...
Today, Eurydice published a first ever report outlining and 'scoring' existing EU Member State policies to help and encourage higher education students to spend part of their studies or training abroad. The report Towards a Mobility Scoreboard: Conditions for Learning Abroad in Europe defines indicators which reflect the objectives of an EU Council Recommendation on promoting the learning mobility of young people, adopted in 2011.
The Scoreboard indicators focus on five areas: information and guidance; foreign language preparation; portability of public grants and loans; recognition of learning outcomes and mobility support to students from a low socio-economic background. Each area is covered in the same way, with maps presenting the most important factors or variables and a set of scoreboard indicators combining the different variables in pre-defined categories.
The Scoreboard covers all 28 EU Member States, as well as Iceland, Turkey, Liechtenstein and Norway.
Directive 2005/36/EC on the recognition of professional qualifications has now been amended. All the changes are listed in a new Directive 2013/55/EU. A briefing note is attached with details of the amendments which are particularly relevant to higher education providers. The ECTS new features, for the first time, in ‘hard’ EU law.By . An tax-accounting mistake by Harvard University has cost some employees as much as $3,000 to $4,000 in taxes they didn’t owe, The Boston Globe reported on Friday. The institution’s mistake led as many as 11,000 workers to pay taxes on money they didn’t earn from 2009 to 2013. Read more.../https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
