Blogs

Another German high-official was recently in the middle of a discussion about a supposedly problematic Ph.D. thesis. After the popular politician and defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the Education minister, Annette Schavan was accused of using other people’s works for her doctorate completed in 1980. Ironically enough, Schavan, a close collaborator of German chancellor Angela Merkel, had among other responsibilities, the duty to oversee the activity of universities, including those in relation to the awarding of doctoral degrees.

We are proud to reveal some GradHacker swag! The gear celebrates nearly two years of building a community that shares advice and insights on how to 'hack' grad school. We have created water bottles, shirts, stickers, and pens that our authors and friends will be spreading at campuses and conferences.

Reviewing the spectrum of challenges leads us to think about pedagogy itself. Rote test questions and answers increasingly are not how students learn, if they were ever useful for anything more than a benchmark of basic facts.

I recently found myself in a conversation with a fellow faculty member about the idea of “comparative advantage.” This is an economic idea that says that people, and countries, should do what they are best at doing. If a person is best at doing math, they should do that. And if a country is best at raising sheep, they should raise sheep. If everyone does what they are best at, the “Classical Economists” tell us, we can then trade with each other and everyone will be better off.

You've probably seen the YouTube video "Wealth Inequality in America". Certainly if you haven't, you know a student who has. It's gotten 3.5 million views just on YouTube, plus it's been replicated on a bunch of other sites. It's even been dubbed into Spanish. The video maker's point isn't just that wealth in this country is unequally distributed -- anybody with a pulse already knows that. And it's not that the inequality of the distribution is getting more extreme -- anybody who's been paying even a bit of attention over the past couple of decades knows that in her/his bones.

An experiment in sustainability by a Hampshire undergrad.

Kevin Carey’s latest, a long piece on financial aid as an enabler of fiscal irresponsibility in elite higher education, is well worth the read. But for everything in it, I’ve been stewing on a single paragraph for the last few days.

My team is working to introduce improved collaboration tools for our online learners. We have concluded that the native Wiki and file exchange features in our LMS are insufficient for the sort of rich collaboration that our student teams need. Uploading and downloading files is too cumbersome and error prone.