Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Brian Croxall. I’ll be honest: there’s not much I like more than a good software update. When I get a pop-up telling me that there’s a new version available, I tend to click “Install and restart” faster than our new puppy hops onto the table when my back is turned. My general feeling is that new versions of things I like will be even more likely to be likable. And for the most part, I tend to be right. But there’s an exception. I’ve been a huge fan of the screenshot tool Skitch ever since Jason reviewed it in September of 2009. More...

By Amy Cavender. With smartphone ownership becoming increasingly common (according to a study released earlier this summer, 56% of all adults in the U.S. own a smartphone; among mobile phone owners, that figure climbs to 61%), it’s no great surprise that many of us are now regularly using a smartphone as part of our workflow. Each smartphone platform has a dizzying array of applications available, but has stock applications for the functions most people use most frequently (email, calendar, camera). If the stock applications fit the way you work, great. More...

By Heather M. Whitney. As unideal as eating lunch at your keyboard is, it happens. Course and meeting schedules can be unforgiving. Before the semester starts, it can be a good idea to stock your office with food that makes in-office lunch take less thought. This semester, I’ll be lucky to have fifteen minutes for lunch most days, so I have been investigating what to get. With the help of the always spot-on Alissa Wilkinson (whose work you should check out, including her new project The Glass List) I have compiled some options from Amazon — ideal since they can be delivered straight to my office. More...

By Anastasia Salter. Many of us at ProfHacker rely on WordPress. I use it for everything from managing my academic web presence to hosting online course materials and communities. This means I have a lot of out-of-date sites that serve their purpose for one semester and live on only as archives. Ever since WordPress 3.6 came out (ok, and for a year before that) I’ve been planning on taking a day to update all these installations and manage my server. Last week, I opened my email to find a message from my hosting provider entitled “WordPress Attack.” I checked my website and realized the scripts had been shut down entirely. Thankfully, it was before the semester started. More...

By Jason Lane and Kevin Kinser. In the United States, we often think of colleges and universities as the anchors of their communities. A campus is often among the largest employers in the region, a significant consumer of local goods and services, a critical supporter of local businesses, and a major attractor of new people to the region. Not only does a college educate the next generation of the work force, but it also plays a major role in enhancing the local quality of life and economy. That role is even more important as other employers close or relocate elsewhere. No matter how bleak the local economic and demographic situation may become, the college campus is a reliable community stalwart and rarely a credible threat to bolt. The news out of Singapore, however, demonstrates why we can’t say the same for international branch campuses. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. As many of us return to campus this fall, we’ll be passing by various buildings adorned with Greek letters that fewer can identify every year. I’m talking about the fraternity and sorority houses, of course—what’s known as Greek life and causes an annual tug-of-war at many institutions. Alumni/ae wax nostalgic over the lifelong bonding that marked their Greek experience. Faculty complain of the hungover frat members they see on Friday mornings. Deans tally the numbers hauled off to the hospital. Women’s and minority organizations criticize gender-related violence and exclusionary policies. And current members of fraternities and sororities tune it all out in order to plan their fall bash and their rush protocols. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. I wrote recently from Bosnia and Herzegovina about the curious practice of taking a unitary language and trying to find ways of representing it as several different languages for political reasons, in order that each of several ethnic groups should be able to claim a tongue of its own. I wrote on the basis of my own experience in the country rather than delving into reference books about it. But after my return I checked the classic reference work on the languages of the world: the Ethnologue. The Ethnologue is published as a book by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, in numerous editions. The latest edition is the 16th, published in 2009 (see the Amazon.com entry for Ethnologue: Languages of the World). It incorporates the ISO 639-3 standard inventory of three-letter language identifiers (you are currently reading ENG, of course). More...

By William Germano. I don’t run with a foodie crowd, but I cheer them on. Food writers, chef-authors, food editors. They spin out our foodie dreams for us. But as the Anglophone world becomes more fashion-forward foodwise, the language of food becomes an ever more puzzling place. There isn’t a Chicago Manual of Culinary Style, though maybe there should be. If there were I’d turn to it for advice linguistic, culinary, and social. My first food questions for a culinary grammarian: When we talk about foreign dishes, when should we deploy a foreign plural? When do we activate unfamiliar foreign forms?
I’ll  stick with Italy, or at least the imaginary Italy that sings its siren call at the American table. More...

By Jeff Selingo. Higher ed, welcome to Obamacare. Frustrated by how his policies of the past four years haven’t stalled rising college-tuition prices or moved the needle on the number of students, particularly low-income students, graduating from college, President Obama took on the higher-ed establishment on Thursday, declaring bluntly that the federal government cannot just keep chasing college prices with federal aid but not getting better results. More...

By Geoff Shullenberger. Steven Pinker wants to save the humanities from themselves. In a bracing manifesto in The New Republic, he laments that humanists have consigned themselves to intellectual stagnation, departmental downsizing, and unemployment by ignoring advances in the natural sciences that could revolutionize their disciplines. He contends that humanist resistance to applications of cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology to the study of history, art, and literature evinces a retrograde hostility to science and indeed the Enlightenment project. Amidst a barrage of recent obituaries for the humanities, some wistful and some perversely gleeful, it is reassuring to hear Pinker declare that “there can be no replacement for the varieties of close reading, thick description, and deep immersion that erudite [humanist] scholars can apply” and that the humanities “are indispensable to a civilized democracy.” More...