Blogs

What’s New at UVenus: If you missed the recent #femlead Twitter chat on Mentorship, led by Brenda Bethman, you can find the transcript here.

To what degree is academic freedom being geographically unsettled – deterritorialized, more accurately – in the context of the globalization of higher education? This was one of the issues I was asked about a few days ago when I spoke to a class of New York-based Columbia University students about the globalization of higher education, with a brief case study about Singapore’s global higher education hub development agenda.

Each month, the writers at University of Venus share their answers to a question we pose for the higher education sector. This month’s question comes to us from Melonie Fullick: What is your least favourite stereotype about academic work?

Some thoughts on the new LMS market, which as Blackboard's pivot might show, might not be about the LMS product itself any longer. So where's the money to be made for companies like Blackboard? Where's the value for universities? It's in the data.

I love to travel, so I was excited when I began to put ideas together for my dissertation and realized that I needed to conduct research in France and elsewhere. My husband, on the other hand, was not thrilled, and who can blame him? Research takes a long time, and we might have to be apart for weeks or even months. By the time I finish my research, we will have had to find creative solutions to make our long-distance marriage work for more than a year. We’re already more than half-way there and have found that despite the crazy schedule and the physical distance that has separated us, we feel closer now than ever before. While I won’t claim that we have everything figured out, we’ve learned a few things along the way.

What is this day even for and how we can use it to create real change.

I am fortunate to have found a group of other women faculty members who like to gather on a regular basis. As I join them for lunch weekly, I am reminded of the concept from Algebra of a “group”, in which members individually and collectively share certain properties.

Last week I was so inspired by John Duffy’s essay, “Virtuous Arguments,” that I sent it to the director of our first term seminar program, thinking it would be worth discussion among the faculty who teach this course. I try not to do this too often; the poor man is busy, and I could easily fill his inbox regularly with advice he doesn’t need. But I was particularly taken with Duffy’s notion that what we really are teaching when we teach first semester writers is how to make an ethical argument. This idea resonated with me because I think the most important thing students can learn by using a library is how to go about making up their minds - or changing the minds of other people - in an ethical manner. And yet, I’m not sure how well we actually convey that when we help students learn research skills.