By Matt Reed. Entrepreneurialism works differently in higher education. In most professions, dissatisfied practitioners have the option of setting out on their own. They can hang the proverbial shingle, beat the bushes for business, and go their own way. Doctors can start medical practices, lawyers can start legal practices, and the like.
I don’t see many professors having that option. Read more...
By Barbara Fister. I’m working on this thing (well, avoiding working on this thing may be more accurate) about how librarians and faculty in the disciplines think differently about knowledge. One of the major differences is that librarians have a tendency to think of knowledge as made up of things and faculty in other disciplines think of people. This was brought home to me this fall in a political science methods course in which the guiding metaphor for understanding the literature of the field was “conversation.” The job of the students preparing to do research was to discover what conversations were going on, find one that was interesting, and discern places in the conversation where there were gaps. Read more...
By Joshua Kim. As we prepare to take a few days off for Thanksgiving I’ve been reflecting on how grateful that I am for our small, and very well connected, edtech community.
How are you and I connected?
Have we worked together? Collaborated on some project? Do we know each other from having met at a conference?
Or maybe we know each other from having worked at the same university (I’ve worked at 3), the same company (1), or from grad school? Read more...
By Scott Jaschik. Anant Agarwal has quit cold turkey -- coffee, that is. But the president of edX, the massive open online course provider co-founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is as energetic about MOOCs as ever, despite almost daily calls from traditionalists for the death of his product. Some of that energy was on display here on Friday, when Agarwal headlined the morning keynote at the Sloan Consortium International Conference on Online Learning. Read more...By Doug Lederman. The discipline of research on online learning is nascent enough, and the body of long-term studies thin enough at this point, that keeping tabs on the state of thinking is a bit like watching a table tennis match. Every study that provides evidence of the effectiveness of online teaching seems to elicit a critical one. And vice versa. Last week's meeting of the Sloan Consortium's International Conference on Online Learning brought the latest such volley. Read more...By Julie Hare for The Australian. Employees at Australia's University of Canberra will vote this week on an agreement that will link pay raises to the financial performance of the institution. In what is thought to be an Australian first, the plan also will include a bonus arrangement for all staff members if the university exceeds its projected operational surplus by $1 million, with the bonus pool capped at $2.5 million. Read more...By Scott Jaschik. Graduate teaching assistants at New York University could be represented by a union as early as next year, under a deal announced Tuesday afternoon. Under the deal between NYU and the United Auto Workers, an election is expected next month on whether graduate teaching assistants would like to be represented by the UAW. If they vote yes, as is expected, NYU would become the first private university since 2005 with unionized TAs. Read more...
By Max Bearak. For decades, India’s institutes of technology and management, the famed I.I.T.’s and I.I.M.’s, have been seen as the pinnacle of this country’s higher education, offering world-class courses and above all, employability to its graduates. Yet a group of successful professionals and entrepreneurs, some of them alumni of these universities, have come together to establish an alternative to what they say is an educational paradigm that overly emphasizes technical capabilities while neglecting vital skills like critical thinking, communications and teamwork. More...
By Kane Fulton. Can scale up to a whopping 8.8 Terabits of capacity. A new version of the high speed JANET network has been launched to support higher education and research institutions. JANET6 can scale up to 8.8 Terabits of capacity using 100-Gigabit Ethernet. Its network architecture was in development for three years and its maker, the government-funded JANET organisation, expects that its fibre infrastructure backbone will last for at least 10 years. More...
By Dick Ahlstrom. Teachers’ unions open campaign to defend third level bodies in their research.
Irish universities are turning into profit-making institutions rather than serving their proper purpose as a public good. The change could destroy the higher education sector, university staff have warned.
A ‘Defend the University’ campaign was launched today by two unions who represent lecturers, the Irish Federation of University Teachers and Siptu. They say they have the initial support of at least 700 lecturers and academics across all seven Irish universities with more moving to support the call.
The campaign also launched a 10-point charter aimed at preventing the universities from becoming a research backup for the private sector. Their concerns arose because of current Government policy which argues that State investment in research should deliver a return, in the case of university principally from useful products, services and medical treatments. More...
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