Blogs

I spend a fairly alarming amount of my time these days on grant-related projects. Each is worthy in its own way, of course, but they have certain limitations in common.

Each year I find myself increasingly mobile and virtual, working all the time but seldom in a single workplace.

Over the weekend, my watch strap broke. So on Monday, on the way home from campus, I went to the store to get a replacement. More precisely, I went to the stores.

It hit me this year that someday I’ll be one of the elders in my family. My parents are ageing gracefully, and both are still in fairly good health. However, I realized that in the not too distant future my sister and I will be responsible for passing on our family lore. We’ve heard many stories and cherished bits of wisdom from both my parents, but to be honest, the details tend to blur.

MIT OpenCourseWare, Peer to Peer University, OpenStudy, and Codecademy are teaming up to launch the "Mechanical MOOC," weaving together existing educational resources (content, Web-based study groups, quizzes and so on) to offer an introductory course in Python. It's hoping to be a different sort of MOOC than the centralized ones we've seen lately from the likes of Stanford (Coursera and Udacity) or MIT (MITx, now edX). Rather than force learners onto a learning management system, this one recognizes that learning can happen in communities and on sites across the open Web.

The conversations and presentations at this year's Boise Confab were cerebrally exhilarating. One particular session really piqued my interest. Jeremiah Shinn, Director for the Student Involvement & Leadership Center at Boise State University, gave an extremely honest presentation about how we conduct hirings in student affairs. Whether you agree with Shinn, disagree, and/or take umbrage, I bet you have an opinion. Here's a quick Q and A where he discusses his thoughts about "bad hires" and "good people":

In recent years the higher education community has focused more on the role institutions’ play in student success. For a long time the blame for failure has been laid squarely at the feet of students. If a student dropped out of college it was assumed that they were unmotivated, under-prepared, or lacked the aptitude required to be a college graduate. The fact that dropouts were admitted meant that they somehow fell through an admissions crack undetected.

That the Internet is a game changer is well-known phenomenon. In fact, the word most usually associated with this phenomenon is "disruptive," and it is a good one because more times than not it is truly a neutral, descriptive term. Depending on what side of the fence you are on at the time of the disruption, you might think it either a good or bad thing. Think content industry: bad. Think people without money who want access to content: good. Of course, life, law and technology are infinitely more complicated than those Manichaeism terms, but you get the idea. Let's see how it applies to academic integrity.