Blogs

I received an email from MLA recently addressed to “Professor Silva.” It made me smile, but immediately after that it made me furrow my brow. Professor Silva? Who is this Professor Silva? Nothing in my past emails indicated I was a professor. I put it away, thinking it may have just been a mistake. But it bothered me a little: I did not want to claim “Professor” when I am not one.

An interesting question caught my eye recently: what’s the half-life of knowledge, for facts we think we know?

Did you check out the Pearson's OpenClass booth at EDUCAUSE? If not, it is worth spending some time on the new OpenClass site www.openclass.com.

Last week I received my daughter's last college tuition bill. When I started writing this blog, she had not yet graduated from high school -- can it be? I looked at the tuition bill with a mixture of anxiety and gratitude.

"Kentucky is the ugly truth the NCAA wants to hide, and Duke is the hysterical lie they hide it with."

"Kentucky is the ugly truth the NCAA wants to hide, and Duke is the hysterical lie they hide it with."

We've reached that point in the semester that can become oppressive for TAs and grad students teaching their own courses. Those essay assignments that seemed like such a good idea back in September are seeming distinctly less so as teetering piles of ungraded papers on your desk. Just as your own semester workload is increasing and deadlines loom for conference abstracts, job applications, travel grants, and summer internships, here comes the dreaded stack of unmarked papers, some of which you know will consume more of your time than they did of their authors.

The advent of Internet-enabled mass access to college level educational content offers a number of opportunities to both consumers and providers. Consumers can shop for any number of content items online from a wide array of providers, choosing products based on the subject, the prestige of the provider, and the subsequent value of participation. Providers will have access to large potential markets with low overhead expense and most importantly without an obligation to validate the preparation and capabilities of the consumers or guarantee a level of successful completion.