Opinion

My break is filled to bursting with work -- and you?

Liberal arts colleges that subscribe to the Division III philosophy enable students to integrate—and balance—their athletic experience with academic interests and other co-curricular activities. Student-athletes compete not because they expect a financial reward or because booster clubs and alumni have a vested interest in their performance, but because they are driven to excel.

We’ve stopped in Sandy Hook any number of times over the last few years, driving between Massachusetts and New Jersey. It’s a cute little town just off route 84, about halfway between Danbury and Waterbury. It has several good lunch places, and a lovely upscale toy store in an old house that couldn’t be any more New England-y if it tried. Behind the toy store there’s a creek with several decks overlooking it, and if I remember right, even a mill wheel. The last couple of times we were there, we spent more time than was strictly necessary, just because we liked it so much.

Katherine Ellison and Cheryl Ball share questions you can expect to hear at an MLA interview.

Michael Bugeja wants his students to come to class, but he has unusual rules to encourage them to do so.

In a previous post we predicted that this year MOOCs will morph into MOCCS (Mid-Sized Online Closed Courses).

I recently read for the first time a book that for many (most?) is a classic: Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines, in its revised edition (2001). I admit that the idea of an ethnography of academic disciplines and their internal codes is a bit narcissistic in the sense that it belongs to the genre of academics studying and writing about academia, but then so is this blog and all the writing about the theories of pedagogy and the analyses of higher education.

Are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) becoming mechanisms for international competition in global higher education? Or are the MOOCs born in the United States (circa 2012) poised to become post-national platforms of higher ed given their cosmopolitan multilingual architects?