The African Quest for Nurturing Doctoral Education
AMA Conference: Keeping things Simple
By Dayna Catropa. The American Marketing Association’s Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education is in Boston this week and the event is off to a great start. After the first day of presentations, one idea seems consistent -- the importance of simplifying when it comes to marketing messaging and design. This idea surfaced in discussions about website design, communicating with internal audiences, reaching prospective students and measuring results. Read more...
Can We Make School Less Boring?
By John Warner. So I’ve been reading about the “Mountaintop Project” at Lehigh University and thinking about how maybe we should turn the college curriculum upside down. The Mountaintop Project is the brainchild of Lehigh alum Scott Belair, who has amassed enough wealth through the founding of Urban Outfitters to give $20 million to his alma mater to create a dedicated place of learning inside of two abandoned steel mills near the Lehigh campus. Belair sees it as a “24 hour campus with hundreds of students” where the goal is to spend an entire semester, “solving the world’s problems.” Read more...
Documenting Absences
Why Now?
Lee, I'm interested in a post about how your earlier attempts may have foundered (i.e. writing consulting), and how you are making this foray different.
I addressed some of these issues here and here, but I think it’s worth diving in a little deeper: what makes this time different? Read more...
Blackboard Labs - Mobile-Friendly, Real-Time Polls
Teaching Sustainability in 21st Century America - #8a
By G. Rendell. My position at Greenback University is in the Sustainability Office, which is located on the operations side of the house. Our primary responsibility is to get the campus operating less unsustainably although, to that end, we actively participate in curricular and co-curricular efforts to get students to understand and expect some level of sustainability. Read more...
Help, I’m a TA and I Hate Teaching!
By Natascha Chtena. As long as you are pursuing a PhD, most people assume that you love or at least like teaching. Pressure increases if your degree is in the humanities or some other “ridiculously inapplicable” discipline. Then, they just see a “budding pedagogue” when they look at you. This stereotype, however, completely obscures the struggles and challenges related to working as a TA. Whether it’s a supervisor from hell, a bunch of backstabbing colleagues, a fear of public speaking, or just a crazy workload that ruins the experience, the truth is many of us can’t—or at least at some point couldn’t—stand teaching. Read more...
Staying Active in No Time at All
By Laura B. McGrath. When people ask me what I actually do all day, I tell them: I sit and read. I also sit and write, and I also sit-while-driving. The demands of my scholarship require me to be stationary while I expend immense amounts of energy and attention on other stationary things. And as Katie outlined last week, all this sitting can have disastrous effects on your body. I’m sure you’ve seen research on the benefits of staying active, even in the smallest ways. Studies have suggested a positive correlation between exercise and brain power. Exercising can improve your mood, and promote better sleep. It can also improve your mental health. Bottom line: there seems to be no shortage of benefits of physical activity, and no shortage of risks associated with physical inactivity. Read more...