Blogs

Three years ago when I uploaded a slide deck to SlideShare, it was the go-to site for presentation sharing. In the years following that initial upload, I've shared a handful of my slides. Unfortunately, the SlideShare interface has suffered from feature creep. The interface has gone from being simple and user-friendly to feeling clunky. Sharing slides with SlideShare just wasn't worth my time. I had to find an alternative…and then I stumbled upon Speaker Deck.

Earlier this month, the American Historical Association announced the anything-but-shocking discovery that tenured men benefit more from marriage than their female counterparts. My female friends and I long ago noticed that women at the top of the academic hierarchy rarely have more than one child and a marriage in the present tense. Scott Jaschik scrutinized the higher statistical propensity for academic women to form endogamous marriages with another Ph.D. Academic men pick partners more willing or better able to fulfill Ruth’s biblical pledge, “whither thou goest, I shall go.”

Are today's MOOCs the netbooks of 2009? Remember the netbook craze? We were all going to replace are overly expensive and bulky laptops with cheap and light netbooks.

We recently revealed the results of one of our survey questions, “What Surprised You When You First Started Working in Higher Education” After the most common answer, “the politics,” next on the list was the slow pace of accomplishing change in higher education.

Now that I know how to run my peer-driven learning course, I need to figure out where is best to do it.

I’m writing this on Inauguration Day. Although I missed hearing the speech live, I did catch a stream of it a little later on, and I was struck by how, in a relatively short speech, the President managed to remind us of the needs of those who have too often been left out of “we, the people” — women who do not earn equal pay, homosexuals who do not enjoy equal rights, immigrants who are not afforded equal protection. It was a liberal speech in the best sense of the word, a speech open to possibility and progress, and while I could, as always, wish it had gone farther, I was glad I had a chance to read and hear it.

In which the NCAA implies giving up on an expectation of integrity, while paying lip service.

Inspired by Nick Bilton's NYTimes article Disruptions: Impulse Buys, Straight to a Screen, I decided to add up exactly how much money I sent to Amazon in 2012 for digital books.