Blogs

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.

I happened to watch an old movie last night. Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. 1948. Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, Melvyn Douglass. A gentle comedy about a (generally) gentle man acting rashly, getting in over his head, coming out of it OK (because, after all, it's a Hollywood production).

There is a concept in economics called a "leading economic indicator," in which certain economic outcomes are seen as providing information about the direction the economy is taking. For example, sales of cars or of new homes may be seen as leading economic indicators, since such sales tell us a lot of information about the willingness of consumers to purchase items that are expensive and which need to be paid off over the course of several years. I thought of this recently as I drove around our neighborhood with my husband and daughter, playing Christmas music on the car radio and admiring the different decorations that have sprung up on the homes in our neighborhood.

Access to medical journals so that inventors, including high school students, can innovate to save lives. Access to copyright materials for the purposes of not-for-profit education as an expanded understanding of the fair use exception in statutory law and further embellished in the doctrine of transformative use in current case law.