Opinion

Planning on taking some time off between Christmas and New Year's? Looking for some fiction that will accomplish the twin goals of keeping your brain engaged with technology trends while giving yourself a break? I have 4 suggestions.

Part 3 in my end-of-year review of the top ed-tech trends. This one addresses Code Year and the popular notion in 2012 that "everyone should learn to code."

My younger daughter decided against having a birthday party for her latest birthday and asked instead that I take her to the One Direction concert at Madison Square Garden.

When The Dark Knight Rises came out, an improv classmate mentioned having heard that Christian Bale's costume was so elaborate he had to be sealed into it at the beginning of each filming day, necessitating a catheter until the costume was removed. "That's why I'm sticking with improv," another classmate observed. "I'm Batman because I say I am." I was reminded of this exchange the other evening, when a friend and I amused ourselves while waiting for a performance to begin by compiling a list of reasons we prefer improv to "legitimate" theater:

The United States, which in the negotiation got just about everything that it wanted, refused to sign the agreement that speaks to global Internet governance. Why? Because the United States does not want to recognize any shared governance of that which it largely controls, namely, the root domain servers that assigns names and numbers on the Internet. ICANN is an arm of the Department of Commerce, which is the government agency still in charge of those servers. The very process of this treaty poses a challenge to the United State's singular control over the technical foundation of the Internet as it operates internationally today.

You can learn a lot about paths for different kinds of academic careers, writes Eszter Hargittai.

Time to degree and size of Ph.D. programs are among the crucial issues facing graduate education in the humanities that require practical solutions now, writes Karin A. Wurst.

Mita Williams, of the University of Windsor, recently posted her slides from an amazing talk that she gave last month. Anyone who follows me on Twitter might have noticed my ALL CAPS enthusiasm for what she had to say. It was a wide-ranging talk, but it projected the kind of future we can have if we pay attention to what’s going on and keep hold of one important idea: the future of the academic library is free.