Blogs

Ben handed in his application to the BFA program at his college last week. It was a demanding process, involving writing, arranging, performing and recording three original compositions and performing and recording a classical piece, as well as a written essay and a resume of pertinent experience.

A new collection of essays from The University of Michigan Press's excellent Poets on Poetry Series.

I have to admit finding the “fiscal cliff” debate a little bit silly, given that the “cliff” in question is entirely artificial. But if you start pulling that thread, it’s not clear where it ends. And even if the cliff is a figment of the collective political imagination, the harm that cliff-driven decisions could do is very real. If you swerve your car to avoid the unicorn you’re hallucinating, the tree you crash into isn’t a hallucination, and the damage done is real and potentially terrible.

Having a best-before date on your PhD compounds the systemic obstacles that are placed in front of non-tenure-track faculty.

When I showed up at the EDUCAUSE exhibit hall last month to speak with Adrian Sannier, I knew that I had no idea where our conversation would go. Sannier, SVP of Product for Pearson Education, is the primary evangelist and lightning rod for Pearson's OpenClass Learning Management System (LMS). Sitting and chatting with Sannier on bright orange ottomans was an experience. Eating orange (there's a theme here) M&M candies and moving his hands at the speed of light, Sannier explained the current state of affairs with OpenClass.

Did you read about Pearson College in the NYTimes? An (almost, working on it) accredited institution of higher learning situated within the corporate campus, and designed and delivered within the corporate structure, seems like a huge deal to me.

As a researcher interested in the digital humanities and as a blogger, editor and academic blogging and social media workshop facilitator, I have observed different shades of digital literacy levels. I have witnessed it not between groups from different countries, disciplines or institutions, but within self-contained groups or communities that are often assumed to have the same skill sets or more or less similar degrees of access to infrastructure, financial means, education, and connectivity amongst others since these groups' members belong to the same organisation, faculty or department. That members of the same organisation should not be assumed to necessarily have the same digital skills or level of access to said skills, education or resources is precisely one of the motivations for this post.

Readers of ProfHacker and Lifehacker will likely be aware of text expansion software. Brian Croxall, Ethan Watrall, Ryan Cordell, and Jason Jones have shared their tips for using software like TextExpander for Mac and PhraseExpress in Windows that have aided their workflow.