Blogs

In higher education there is no more well-known privacy law than the Family Education Rights Privacy Act, or "FERPA." Established in the 1970s to protect against abuses law enforcement made against students involved in the civil rights and anti-war movements, this early public privacy law fits into type 3 of the five categories I established in earlier blogs.

This one’s a little bit self-indulgent, but I hope my wise and worldly readers will bear with me. I think the answers will be of wider interest.

I don't know much about K-12 education. Beyond the fact that I have two kids (8th and 10th grade) in our local public middle school and high school, and that I spent 12 years in public primary and secondary schools, my knowledge of the sector is embarrassingly skimpy.

When asked about how you're doing on your academic work, does your heart race, adrenaline spike, or do you just go numb? If you answered, “yes” to any of these questions, you are in “triage” mode, just trying to stem the bleeding of your time and energy enough to complete your tasks and (hopefully) get a few hours of sleep. However, you probably want more out of your life and work than this.

It's not always easy to just move on from wanting a traditional academic position.

Over the weekend I had a fascinating conversation over Twitter with Aaron Tay, a brilliant young academic librarian at the University of Singapore. (I’m not the only one who thinks he’s smart; Library Journal named him a Mover and Shaker last year.) We were discussing Library Journal’s recent report, covered right here in Inside Higher Ed, about students’ views of academic libraries.

What could public higher education do with a significant, sustained funding source dedicated specifically to innovation?

On Monday we learned that The Daily, News Corp's mobile app only newspaper, will cease publication on December 15th. From the publication's start in February of 2011, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp invested $30 million in creating this short lived digital newspaper.