Formation Continue du Supérieur

2 juin 2013

France’s Debate Over English Misses the Point

By Peter Gumbel. The following is a guest post by Peter Gumbel, associate professor at Sciences Po, in Paris, and author of France’s Got Talent: The Woeful Consequences of French Elitism. The French government has introduced legislation that aims to attack some of the greatest weaknesses of the national higher-education system, including the fragmentation of public universities and the chronically high failure rate of undergraduates. These problems have been analyzed and agonized over for years, so you might think that the public debate over the passage of this legislation would be about how, finally, someone is trying to fix the problems. Instead, the bill introduced in Parliament on May 21 by Geneviève Fioraso, the minister for higher education, and scheduled to be voted on May 28, has provoked a controversy over an issue that neither she nor her advisers saw coming. It’s a line in the law that officially authorizes French universities to teach some classes in English. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 17:27 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Tags: France

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

2 juin 2013

The Battle[']s Joined

By Lucy Ferriss. Living, as I do, near Bishops Corner, not far from Corbins Corner, in easy reach of a Walgreens and a Marshalls, not to mention Lyons Gulf service station, I wasn[’]t completely surprised to learn that the United States Board on Geographic Names has clamped down on the efforts of citizens in Thurman, N.Y., to name a nearby mountain Jimmy’s Peak. They[’]ve been removing (in what, misheard, might sound like a different form of mutilation) “the genitive apostrophe and the ‘s’” since 1890, after all, though “the Board’s archives contain no indication of the reason for this policy.” Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 17:25 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

2 juin 2013

Get Smart People

By Ben Yagoda. I’ve proven I’m not too good at touting the Word of the Year. A couple of years ago, I was all on about curate, and it didn’t even get a mention in the end-of-year tally. Nevertheless, I am giving it another try. The word I have in mind is smart. Mind you, I don’t mean smart in the sense of smart phone or smart card or smart bomb: the “smart” in those formulations seems to signify merely that the device or object purports to mimic the reactions of a human with rather limited intelligence. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 17:23 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

2 juin 2013

Redefining the Dictionary

By Allan Metcalf. Last week at the University of Georgia, down in Athens, some 60 odd people came together for a meeting. They shared a Rare, but not Obsolete, interest: dictionaries.
“We are strange people,” said Ilan Kernerman, head of K Dictionaries, in Israel. “Most people do not like dictionaries.” Indeed, he wondered whether there will be dictionaries at all in the future. The answer seemed to be, Yes there will, but the dictionary of the future will require a new definition. It won’t be a book. It was the 19th biennial conference of the Dictionary Society of North America. The society includes those who make dictionaries and those at colleges and universities who study them, not only from America but from Asia and Europe as well. There were talks on everything from jazz in the Oxford English Dictionary to lexicography in China during the Song Dynasty (960-1279), from the Big Apple of New York City to the 19th-century Hobson-Jobson dictionary of English in India. But among more than 30 such talks, there was a common thread: Dictionaries aren’t what they used to be. And they aren’t yet what they are going to be. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 17:20 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

2 juin 2013

Machine Translation Without the Translation

By Geoffrey Pullum. I have been ruminating this month on why natural language processing (NLP) still hasn’t arrived, and I have pointed to three developments elsewhere that seem to be discouraging its development. First, enhanced keyword search via Google’s influentiality-ranking of results. Second, the dramatic enhancement in applicability of speech recognition that dialog design facilitates. I now turn to a third, which has to do with the sheer power of number-crunching. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 17:18 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

2 juin 2013

English’s Self-Inflicted Wounds

By Mark Bauerlein. According to the Modern Language Association, in the late 1960s and early 70s, English accounted for about 7.5 percent of all bachelor’s degrees granted in the United States, but the portion plummeted to around 3.5 percent in the early 80s, climbed a bit to nearly 5 percent in the early 90s, then dropped steadily to 3.47 percent in 2004. English has gone from a major unit in the university to a minor one, its standing propped up largely by freshman writing requirements and creative-writing courses. At Emory University, where I teach English, when I arrived in 1989 and soon became director of undergraduate studies, the number of majors reached 350. Today, our majors linger at around 150. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 17:14 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

2 juin 2013

There Is No Gene for Finishing College

By Paul Voosen. A couple of years ago, Daniel J. Benjamin, a behavioral economist and associate professor at Cornell University, noticed a disturbing trend in genoeconomics, the nascent discipline that seeks to tie human genetics to traits relevant to the social sciences, like risk aversion, happiness, or even self-employment. Most of the work was statistically weak, he found, conducted on small samples of a few hundred people. Benjamin calculated that scientists could legitimately conclude almost nothing from those studies. It was a black mark on a charged discipline, one that invariably brings up the hoary nature-nurture debate and past associations with eugenics. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 17:06 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

2 juin 2013

Chatting One-on-One With 20,000 Applicants?

By Eric Hoover. Prospective students have a zillion questions for colleges, and they expect Google-fast answers. Yet no admissions office has enough of a staff to handle each and every query. That’s why Tessa McSwain sees promise in live chats. At the Rocky Mountain Association for College Admission Counseling’s annual conference here on Thursday, Ms. McSwain, assistant director of admissions at the University of Colorado at Boulder, described her office’s recent experiments with two forms of online communication. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 17:04 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

2 juin 2013

Online Course Platforms Offer Paid Freelance Gigs to Professors

By Steve Kolowich. As online courses multiply outside the formal structures of academe, professors increasingly have opportunities to earn cash on the side by freelancing. Udemy, an online-education company, offers anyone, including professors, the chance to design and teach an online course. Instructors set the prices for their courses, which tend to run from about $30 to $100 per student, and take home 70 percent of the revenue. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 17:02 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

2 juin 2013

A Humanist Apologizes to Numbers

By Jon Volkmer. On behalf of word people everywhere, I hereby extend this general apology to numbers. We have not always counted you as friends. I myself, an educator of the literary persuasion, have sometimes failed to live up to my pan-disciplinary liberal-arts ideals. I am tacitly complicit when advisees use foul invective in re the math requirement. I break out in hysterical yawning in the presence of anisotropic fractional maximals. In my defense, numbers have not always been nice to me, either. I think it started with that C-plus in algebra. Numbers still seem, at times, downright vindictive. At tax time, for instance. Or when I step on a scale. My idea of an irrational number is what I see in my checkbook after paying the bills each month. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 16:34 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote