Columns

Last November, I briefly visited Boston to give a lecture at Northeastern University, my alma mater where I got my Ph.D. degree. The last time I was there was four and a half years ago to defend my dissertation. It felt like “Homecoming” for me this time, when I visited my old university after such a long time.

There is no doubt that online education has arrived in Higher Education. Each year, the numbers of colleges and universities offering online courses increases. There is certainly appeal for these types of courses: students can better fit them into busy schedules and traveling to campus is no longer required. While I dabbled in teaching hybrid and online courses for a while, I have been teaching online for most of the past two years. Additionally, I began my graduate career in a hybrid PhD program: two weeks of face-to-face instruction with the rest of the instruction and work provided entirely online, and mostly asynchronously. Having been on both sides of online learning has taught me a few lessons about how best to help students learn in an environment that provides as many challenges (if not more) as face-to-face teaching.

Social media has been present in the lives of collegiate athletes for as long as there has been social media. However, it would seem that coaches and the NCAA are just now realizing that social media is something that they may want to learn more about.

We are suffering under an acute shortage of technologically literate smart fiction. The Fear Index should be read up by everyone who works in and around computing.

Chile’s Ministry of Education has launched a web portal offering with unprecedented detail employment and earnings data to prospective applicants to higher education. The portal, called “Mi futuro” is a searchable database that lists hundreds of degree programs, professional and technical, from Medicine to Auto Mechanic, displaying for each program of every institution of higher education in the country the following information: drop-out rate, average time to degree, average earnings of the graduates after 4 years of graduation, current tuition fees for the program, and accreditation status of the program.

Apparently, a scholar of student success, Shaun Harper, has decided to turn around the usual methods of studying African-American men in college. Instead of the typical questions - what obstacles do they face, what prevents success, etc. -- he decided to focus on African-American men who have succeeded in college and to try to determine what worked for them.

Is "building" an essential part of digital humanities?

A reader emailed recently to alert me to the publication of a new study of working mothers, in the journal Gender and Society. (An aside: I hate the term “working mothers,” as I think it devalues the actual work of mothering. I’ll try to find other ways to say it as I write about the study, but to date I haven’t found a good substitute.) The findings didn’t really surprise me, but they were confirmatory: most working mothers, single or married, find value, fulfillment, and meaning in paid work outside the home.