Blogs

One of my favorite distractions is podcasts. I love them. They're part of my commute, they're part of my leisure time, and they're part of my work time.

It’s the time of year when students must gather their course materials as classes begin. Long gone is the obligatory march through the campus store purchasing textbooks. These days, students can start their search online and their options have multiplied.

Some flotsam, some jetsam. Some sound, some fury. Lots of sadness.

I have a hard time working without music. No matter what grad school-related task I am working on, it just feels strange to be doing it in silence.

According to the Twenty Million Mind Foundation, an organization devoted to the "creation, sharing, and proliferation of more effective and affordable educational content by leveraging disruptive technologies, open educational resources, and new models for collaboration," the increasing cost of textbooks is an important factor in both rising student debt and high dropout rates.

As a feminist educator, my academic and political training influences my popular culture consumption and my assessment of what I have consumed. “Girls,” a dramedy written and directed by Lena Dunham, who also stars in the HBO cable television series, is no different than any other popular culture artifact in that I do not have the ability to turn off my feminist educator lens.

Latin America remains locked into a content-laden notion of university education. After all, universities in the region have a long tradition of preparing professionals. In many countries the university degree is equivalent to a professional license, making it more critical to stuff a student’s brain with as much discipline-specific knowledge as possible. This paradigm may have been effective during the last century, but is it still the best way to prepare future generations of university graduates?

In statistics, we talk about a “population” as being everyone that could possibly be included in a study, such as everyone who lives in New York City. In contrast, we talk about a “sample” as being a subset of a population, as, for example, all people in New York with a last name beginning with “L”.