Monthly Archives: October 2014

Speed kills

\”Sleeker. Faster. More Intuitive\” (The New York Times); \”Welcome to a world where speed is everything\” (Verizon FiOS); \”Speed is God, and time is the devil\” (chief of Hitachi’s portable-computer division). In \”real\” time, life speeds up until time itself seems to disappear—fast is never fast enough, everything has to be done now, instantly. To […] … learn more→

Why you should use Twitter during your PhD

Twitter, according to Wikipedia (yes – how terribly un-scientific of me), is an online social networking and micro-blogging service that enables users to send and read “tweets”, which are text messages limited to 140 characters. Twitter is vital to the success of your PhD. Yes, you heard me read me correctly, a seemingly superficial social […] … learn more→

Ranking the worst Colleges and Universities in the U.S.

This month’s issue of Washington Monthly includes a thoughtful article by Ben Miller in which he attempts to compile such rankings and, in fact, provides several alternative lists of the twenty worst colleges and universities in the U.S. For analyses of the rankings, see the full article, which is available at: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2014/features/americas_worst_colleges051752.php?page=all. Most of the […] … learn more→

To save the Humanities, change the narrative

In the classic children’s story Chicken Little, the main character feels an acorn drop on her head and infers from this that the sky is falling. She announces the sky’s imminent collapse to all the animals she encounters. Soon Chicken Little and her friends get an invitation into a fox’s den to escape the danger. […] … learn more→

Academic integrity: Defining originality across campus

The faculty members in the chemistry department are confused. Last semester, the campus teaching center held a series of workshops to get faculty more familiar with the anti-plagiarism tool that the university adopted and linked into everyone’s online course environment. The teaching center showed everyone who attended the training sessions 51 ways that they could […] … learn more→

Data mining the new black box of self-driving cars

Autonomous vehicles, or self-driving cars, are likely to be seen more widely on roads in 2015. Already, legislation authorising the use of autonomous vehicles has been introduced in the US states of Nevada, Florida, California and Michigan, with similar legislation being planned for the UK. To date, these laws have focused on legalising the use […] … learn more→

Higher-Ed reform or drinking game? You decide.

\”Because each course in General Studies has been approved to meet specific learning outcomes associated with the General Studies curriculum, the course student learning outcomes listed on the syllabus must include learning outcomes that align with the identified General Studies learning outcomes and include assignments that will serve as embedded assessments for these learning outcomes. […] … learn more→

The “slow” decline of the elite scholarly journal

The elite scholarly journals, long the gatekeepers of the ivory tower, have been losing their effectiveness this last decade or so–in their gatekeeping role, at least. As these journals increasingly become profit centers in the corporate publishing industry, their real impact is constricted to only those who can afford the toll. At the same time, […] … learn more→

Destroying Higher Education: A rebuttal

Assignment 1: “Fill in the names and capitals of the 20 southeast Asian countries on this blank map.” Assignment 2: “Use techniques of advanced calculus to show how perturbations in the measurements of Mercury’s orbit confirm the relativistic effects predicted by Einstein.” —both of these assignments are from 4000 level, senior level, courses in state […] … learn more→

My class, my choice.

“To be absolutely blunt, it is time for individual faculty to give up, cheerfully and not grudgingly, any claim to sole authority over teaching methods of any kind.” – Former Princeton President William Bowen earlier this week at the “Teaching in the University of Tomorrow” conference at Rice University (via Jason Jones). That’s a pretty […] … learn more→