Formation Continue du Supérieur

26 mai 2013

When in doubt… watch SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN

By Brian Mathews. It has been an exhaustive academic year. This summer I am applying “energy management” techniques in order to be more effective. I’ve been way off balance this year. Some people make New Year’s Resolutions– for me it is Summer Resolutions. I’ve been watching a string of dark movies lately (Argo, Django, Zero Dark) and a friend recommended I change it up with Singin’ In The Rain. I’ll admit that this movie was nowhere near my watch list: I don’t do musicals! But I watched and enjoyed it. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 23:15 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

26 mai 2013

The Point of Grad School is to Learn to Say “No”

By Brian Croxall. A few weeks ago, I discussed how I discovered toward the end of graduate school that mentoring is a fantasy. In short, what I mean by this is that in any advising situation both parties often have expectations of how the relationship will work and that these expectations do not always align with each other or with reality. I came to this realization after one of my dissertation readers suggested I add a bit of Heidegger to my project. (If that sounds like the set-up to an academic punchline, well, it’s Friday, right?) Eventually, I declined, and my reader didn’t bring it up again. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 23:12 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

26 mai 2013

A Pedagogy’s Punctuated Equilibrium

By George David Clark. The first time I wrote a statement of teaching philosophy, I had just entered a doctoral program and was participating in a mandatory professional-development workshop. We read a handful of model statements by faculty members in the department and then set out to write our own. The form was clear and straightforward: Lead with general but enthusiastic statements about the teaching mission, introduce some of the complicating pedagogical issues specific to the field, find one or two opportunities to describe specific classroom successes, and conclude with a summary expression of how exciting it is to see students achieve under your direction. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 23:09 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

26 mai 2013

Remaining Relevant

By Isaac Sweeney. I’d like to tell readers about a couple of cool things Richard Bland College is doing. This is partly because I love my institution and I want it to be a successful place, but it’s also because I think these programs are innovative and might help put Richard Bland College of the College of William & Mary on the proverbial map. The first program is called the Language Institute. This is a partnership with Main Street Virtual Learning, and it uses an online platform that looks like one of the best I’ve seen. Students learn conversational languages, and Main Street’s parent company has a long history of working with military personnel to teach useful language skills. It’s unlike traditional language classes in that students learn how to speak the language, but they probably won’t learn so much about writing or reading the language. As the marketing material says for the Language Institute, “courses focus on the ‘hows’ of language, not the ‘why’ of traditional linguistics programs.” What I’m most excited about is the online platform, which I plan to try with an online English class in the fall. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 23:07 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

26 mai 2013

Is It the English Department’s Fault?

By Rob Jenkins. As I read Robert Zaretsky’s recent post, “What’s at Stake with Grade Inflation,” in which he notes how poorly his history students write, I couldn’t help but recall a confrontation I had several years ago with a business professor at the college where I was teaching at the time. I was walking across campus one bright, sunny day (this was in Florida, where almost all the days are bright and sunny), when I saw this colleague coming toward me on the hedge-lined concrete walkway. He and I had enjoyed a cordial relationship over the years, occasionally stopping to chat about children and vacations and such when we ran into each other on campus, so I smiled as he approached and prepared to greet him. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 23:04 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

26 mai 2013

Has Higher Education Lost Control Over Quality?

By Ellen Hazelkorn. Educational quality is now a hot topic in higher education globally. In recent months, I have been involved in institutional assessments and government meetings on the topic in Finland, Romania, Ireland, and the United States—and shortly I’ll travel to Gabon on behalf of the European Union and the African Union to discuss quality issues.
While the discussions vary, what’s clear is that quality is no longer solely the domain of higher-education providers or independent agencies, like accreditors. Many governments want to step up their role in assuring that educational programs are worthwhile. In the United States, this point is recently illustrated by the Obama administration’s College Scorecard and its 2014 budget proposal to examine “new quality validation systems that can identify appropriate competencies, assessments, and curricula.” Greater accountability had previously been proposed in 2006 by the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, established by the Bush administration. Its strong support for more federal involvement caused great controversy within higher education at the time. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 22:59 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

26 mai 2013

Prospecting for Antedates

By Allan Metcalf. Remember 1849? Those were the great days of the California Gold Rush. Hundreds of thousands dropped everything to grab gold from the foothills near Sutter’s Fort. In that heady time, you didn’t need lots of equipment—perhaps just a pan to sift riverbed gravel for nuggets. Well, it’s 1849 all over again. Not in gold mining, which now generally requires sophisticated technology, but in etymology, the study of word origins. Vast new fields of data have been opened and made accessible, so it’s easier than ever to find an earlier instance of a word or phrase not yet recorded in any dictionary. Last week I gave an example of antedating, the Yale librarian Fred Shapiro’s discovery of an 1886 hot dog in a Nashville newspaper, some six years earlier than any previously discovered use of that now-familiar name for a sausage in a bun. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 22:45 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

26 mai 2013

Speech Recognition vs. Language Processing

By Geoffrey Pullum. I have stressed that we are still waiting for natural language processing (NLP). One thing that might lead you to believe otherwise is that some companies run systems that enable you to hold a conversation with a machine. But that doesn’t involve NLP, i.e. syntactic and semantic analysis of sentences. It involves automatic speech recognition (ASR), which is very different. ASR systems deal with words and phrases rather as the song “Rawhide” recommends for cattle: “Don’t try to understand ’em; just rope and throw and brand ’em.” Labeling noise bursts is the goal, not linguistically based understanding. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 22:41 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

26 mai 2013

What Colleges Can Learn From K-12 Education

By Richard Kahlenberg. Our higher-education system is often thought of as a model for elementary and secondary education because top American universities rank among the very best in the world. But maybe it’s the reverse that is true. After all, only about half of first-time college students earn certificates or degrees within six years, a completion rate much lower than among high-school students. At community colleges, while 81 percent of first-time entering students say they would like to earn bachelor’s degrees, only 12 percent do so within six years. Why are completion rates so low in higher education, especially community colleges? One reason, according to a blue-ribbon panel assembled by the Century Foundation, is that higher education has not directly confronted the growing economic and racial separation of students within its ranks. Largely separate sets of institutions for white and minority students—and for rich and poor—are rarely equal, either in K-12 schooling or in higher education. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 22:37 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

26 mai 2013

An Open Letter to a Founder of Coursera

By Robert Meister. An Open Letter to Daphne Koller
Co-Founder and Co-President of Coursera and
Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University
Dear Professor Koller,
Because I share your vision of creating a world in which all have access to an excellent and empowering education, I would like to propose a new online course for you to make freely available through the Coursera platform. Its title is “The Implications of Coursera’s For-Profit Business Model for Global Public Education.”
You and your company’s compelling pitch to consumers suggests that the private sector—that is, venture capitalists and not taxpayers—can deliver a more equal world in which income will be based on the skills and knowledge people actually acquire rather than the unnecessarily-scarce credentials for which they are eligible and can afford to pay. It is natural to hope that in this more equal and more productive world, incomes could rise for everyone willing to acquire the necessary academic knowledge and take the tests to prove it. This, in fact, was exactly what was promised by the original California Master Plan for Higher Education, using taxpayers’ money, when it was adopted, in 1960. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 22:29 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote