Formation Continue du Supérieur

20 mai 2013

Do You Formally Schedule Research Time?

By Ryan Cordell. I’ve just wrapped up my first year as a junior faculty member at a new institution. Overall it’s been a wonderful transition, but I have run up against that familiar problem for academics: the encroachment of other duties into research time. Teaching well is essential, of course—as indicated by the many posts here at ProfHacker about the classroom—and every faculty post requires significant service. The time demands of both can creep into any crevice in a faculty member’s schedule, however, pushing research further and further into the ever-receding future. For me, at least, a haphazard approach to research time just didn’t cut it. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 15:45 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

20 mai 2013

Updates to ScheduleOnce for Google Calendar Appointments

By Heather M. Whitney. After everyone finished gasping at the news that Google was canceling Calendar Appointments, which we reported about last winter here at ProfHacker, many faculty pursued other online solutions for allowing students and colleagues to view available appointment times and make reservations. (And a brief note before the comments start coming in – Google has indeed since stated that they will keep Google Calendar Appointments for Google Apps for Education, Business, and Government users, but many ProfHacker readers still need the functionality for their personal Google accounts, which they want to use for this purpose.) ScheduleOnce is one option that many educators are using, and the site’s blog just announced a number of very useful updates to the system. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 15:40 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

20 mai 2013

Paying Attention in the Digital Age

By Nigel Thrift. There is an issue, which may or may not be a problem for universities around the world, but that is certainly gaining a lot of attention in Britain and the United States—namely, attention itself. Students increasingly arrive at university having grown up in a world in which their habits of study are heavily influenced by new media. They are used to media acting as a continuous stream of content that is more like a river of images than a page of text. According to one account, that means much shorter attention spans, much greater attention to visual modes of understanding, greater modulation of time, more and more reliance on interfaces, and so on. (See, most recently, Stephen Apkon’s The Age of the Image.) Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 15:38 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

20 mai 2013

Dueling Titles

By Lucy Ferriss. Hundreds of readers opened their New York Times Book Review recently to see a review of a novel that had already been reviewed in April ... no, wait. That earlier book was Life After Life by the terrific British novelist Kate Atkinson. This book is Life After Life by the terrific American novelist Jill McCorkle. A galumphing typo by the compiler of the table of contents at NYTBR? Nope. There’s the review, glowing about McCorkle’s book much as the reviewer of Atkinson’s book had glowed a mere two weeks earlier. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 15:35 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

20 mai 2013

Hot Dog!

By Allan Metcalf. News flash in the etymological world: Two new antedatings of hot dog! In the etymological world, prospecting for earlier instances of a word is like prospecting for gold in the geological world. You look in the online Oxford English Dictionary for the earliest known date of a word and then go data mining in the archives of old publications for something earlier. One of the leading prospectors is Fred Shapiro of the Yale University Library. He announced his findings in the first instance earlier this year on the American Dialect Society’s discussion list, ADS-L. That got the attention of the assay office, a.k.a. Comments on Etymology, a paper and ink journal I’ve written about before. It’s published by Gerald Cohen at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, and it’s the first draft of etymological history. The news about hot dog came in the recently arrived Vol. 42, Issue 6 for March 2013... But why call it a hot dog in the first place? Simple enough: It’s a joke. It goes back to a 19th-century rumor that the sausages were made of dog meat. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 15:32 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

20 mai 2013

Keyword Search, Plus a Little Magic

By Geoffrey Pullum. I promised last week that I would discuss three developments that turned almost-useless language-connected technological capabilities into something seriously useful. The one I want to introduce first was introduced by Google toward the end of the 1990s, and it changed our whole lives, largely eliminating the need for having full sentences parsed and translated into database query language. The hunch that the founders of Google bet on was that simple keyword search could be made vastly more useful by taking the entire set of pages containing all of the list of search words and not just returning it as the result but rather ranking its members by influentiality and showing the most influential first. What a page contains is not the only relevant thing about it: As with any academic publication, who values it and refers to it is also important. And that is (at least to some extent) revealed in the link structure of the Web. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 15:29 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

20 mai 2013

Graduation Rates: Flawed as a Measure of Colleges, but Still Useful

By Jeff Selingo. It’s commencement season on college campuses, the time when graduating students see their years of effort culminate a victory: getting the degree. That road to commencement was longer for some students than for others, though, and eventually those varying journeys will be reflected in the institution’s graduation rate. The value of that number has been debated almost from the day it was first calculated in the mid-1990s. The flaws of the official government rate are well known: It counts only full-time, first-time students who enroll in the fall, excluding those who transfer out of the institution or transfer in and eventually graduate. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 15:27 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

20 mai 2013

Yale Joins the MOOC Club; Coursera Looks to Translate Existing Courses

By Steve Kolowich. For all the star power harnessed by massive-open-online-course providers, Yale University has been a notable absence. While many of its elite peers scrambled to get out ahead of the MOOC wave, Yale bided its time. That’s about to change. Yale announced on Wednesday that it would soon offer MOOCs through Coursera, the Silicon Valley-based company. Yale plans to offer four courses beginning in January, focusing on constitutional law, financial markets, morality, and Roman architecture. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 15:25 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

20 mai 2013

Instructure Offers Bounty for New Educational Apps

By Jake New. Isolated. Too exclusive. Antisocial.
That’s how Brian Whitmer, a founder of Instructure, describes the education-technology sector, particularly the space occupied by developers of learning-management systems like Instructure’s Canvas. “It’s become clear that ed tech does not have the type of ecosystem that other sectors have,” he said. “It’s hampering innovation. We need to fix that.” To call attention to that problem, Instructure and other learning-management-system providers, including Blackboard and Desire2Learn, are offering cash rewards to encourage the creation of apps using the Learning Tools Interoperability standard, or LTI. Read more...

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

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote

20 mai 2013

How Counselors Can Shape the College Plans of First-Generation Students

By Beckie Supiano. High-school counselors can influence whether ninth-graders whose parents do not have bachelor’s degrees plan to attend college, suggests a report released on Thursday by the National Association for College Admission Counseling. The report, “Preparing Students for College: What High Schools Are Doing and How Their Actions Influence Ninth Graders’ College Attitudes, Aspirations, and Plans,” is based on an analysis of new, nationally representative data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009. Read more...

Posté par pcassuto à 15:21 - Commentaires […] - Permalien [#]

Partager cet article

Vous aimez ?

0 vote