Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Simona Chiose. In advance of budget day Thursday, a debate is heating up over the extent to which Canada is really experiencing a skills gap. Maclean’s argues that B.A.s who are overqualified for service jobs are taking jobs from the less educated without being able to fill gaps in science or technical industries. Meanwhile, as Alex Usher points out in this blog, most of the occupations predicted to experience labour shortages will require B.A.s. Read more...

By Melonie Fullick. This week on Wednesday, my Twitter feed was swamped first with posts about the newly elected Pope (which I expected). What I didn’t expect was that by the time evening rolled around, the Pope tweets were being eclipsed by reactions to Google’s decision to “kill” its RSS aggregation tool, Reader. Now, I use Reader a lot–every day–to sort through piles of higher education news, so I was annoyed by this news. It means I need to seek out a new tool and set it up, not just for my personal use but for the professional accounts I run as well. Thankfully feeds can be exported, so the actual transfer shouldn’t be a big deal. There are other options available, and more are being built. For me the issue is more the irrationality of dismantling a perfectly good tool (like when Tweetdeck was bought and destroyed by Twitter), but I’m leaving that aside for now. What I want to address is the theme of digital moralism, which is of course nothing new, but which made another appearance in the Google Reader discussion. Some of the online responses I saw were both predictable and deeply frustrating in a specific way. The line of arguing often begins with “I told you so”, as in, “I told you that using a tool from an Evil Corporation like Google would come to no good”. Followed by, “If you just do X” (get your own website or server; write your own app), your problem is solved. Then: “What, you don’t know how to code? Everyone should know how to code. Why not teach yourself? It’s easy.” Read more...

By Matthew Reisz. A vice-chancellor has argued that “crass implementation” of “the wonderful principle of open access” has led to universities “subsidising publishers’ businesses and not getting value for money from journals”. Few dispute “the principle that information gained by public funding should be accessible to the public”, Christopher Higgins, head of Durham University, told the annual conference of the Academic, Professional and Specialist Group of the Booksellers Association last week in Brighton. Yet under current systems, he said, universities pay three times over. They must take money from research budgets to make material freely accessible; they provide much essential refereeing and editorial work for virtually nothing; and then they must pay for journals at prices that have risen faster than tuition fees or research grants, he said. Read more...