Blogs

In a previous post we predicted that this year MOOCs will morph into MOCCS (Mid-Sized Online Closed Courses).

I recently read for the first time a book that for many (most?) is a classic: Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines, in its revised edition (2001). I admit that the idea of an ethnography of academic disciplines and their internal codes is a bit narcissistic in the sense that it belongs to the genre of academics studying and writing about academia, but then so is this blog and all the writing about the theories of pedagogy and the analyses of higher education.

Are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) becoming mechanisms for international competition in global higher education? Or are the MOOCs born in the United States (circa 2012) poised to become post-national platforms of higher ed given their cosmopolitan multilingual architects?

Planning on taking some time off between Christmas and New Year's? Looking for some fiction that will accomplish the twin goals of keeping your brain engaged with technology trends while giving yourself a break? I have 4 suggestions.

Part 3 in my end-of-year review of the top ed-tech trends. This one addresses Code Year and the popular notion in 2012 that "everyone should learn to code."

My younger daughter decided against having a birthday party for her latest birthday and asked instead that I take her to the One Direction concert at Madison Square Garden.

When The Dark Knight Rises came out, an improv classmate mentioned having heard that Christian Bale's costume was so elaborate he had to be sealed into it at the beginning of each filming day, necessitating a catheter until the costume was removed. "That's why I'm sticking with improv," another classmate observed. "I'm Batman because I say I am." I was reminded of this exchange the other evening, when a friend and I amused ourselves while waiting for a performance to begin by compiling a list of reasons we prefer improv to "legitimate" theater:

The United States, which in the negotiation got just about everything that it wanted, refused to sign the agreement that speaks to global Internet governance. Why? Because the United States does not want to recognize any shared governance of that which it largely controls, namely, the root domain servers that assigns names and numbers on the Internet. ICANN is an arm of the Department of Commerce, which is the government agency still in charge of those servers. The very process of this treaty poses a challenge to the United State's singular control over the technical foundation of the Internet as it operates internationally today.