Opinion

Nearly half way through my first semester of college, I found myself trying to divine some cosmic answers about life from my bowl of cereal. Like a mystic scattering bones, I sifted my spoon through the peanut butter and chocolate flavors of the Reese’s Puffs, looking for some sort of fateful implication. Oh starchy balls of Red 40 and Yellow 5/6 dye, won’t you tell me what my future has in store? The cereal answered by becoming soggier. Soon the rioting of my slightly malnourished stomach overcame my pending existential crisis.

By Nick Coffman-Price

Ruth Starkman considers how departments are (and should be) considering digital scholarship -- and what young scholars should know about how their work will be evaluated.

By Ruth Starkman

Everyone's talking about Emlyn - Emlyn Hughes, the Columbia University physics professor who began his students' immersion in his subject by turning down the lecture theater's lights, stripping off his street clothes and putting on a ninja uniform, and then showing a film featuring disconnected images of violence and atrocity - the destruction of the Twin Towers, goose-stepping Nazis, Mussolini strung up, Major Kong on his bomb from Dr. Strangelove.

By UD

In response to yesterday’s post about the seeming invisibility of the social sciences, a commenter asked me why, if I value the social sciences so highly, I strongly advise against people getting Ph.D.’s in them. Shortly after that, I saw Michael Berube’s essay about graduate admissions, in which he kinda, sorta suggested that they should be cut back, but not unless the departments are willing, and it’s complicated, and anyway aren’t we all “awesome.”

By Matt Reed

Technology. Even the word is enough to send some TAs into a tizzy. After all, some TAs' worst nightmares concern pouring over a presentation for hours, only to have a faulty internet connection, damaged jump drive, or other “helpful” technology fail in front of their class. In this post, we will take up where our bold GradHacker forerunners, Andrea Zellner ("I'm a Digital Grad in a Digital World"), Ashley Wiersma ("3 Ways to Hack your Class with Google+"), and Steph Hedge ("Teaching with Blogs") have gone before us. Today, we’re tackling technologies to take the more ho-hum tasks of course management to the next level.

By Carleen Carey

There's some bad instruction going around regarding dialog tags.

By John Warner

Scanning the headlines today, I came across this article about Oxford University turning off Google Docs. Having made a friend at Oxford of a colleague in IT there, Tony Brett, I looked at my watch, recognized that it was noon for him, emailed him the link with a subject line: Tell Me More! To which Tony immediately replied with this more extended discussion of the technical security rational for the administrative decision.

By Tracy Mitrano