Blogs

On a recent Tuesday it was over 60 degrees before sunrise in Chicago (setting an historic record), while it is dropping to 7 degrees by Friday. I’m not going to list the reasons why we should care about global warming nor the indisputable facts that back it up. (Bill McKibben’s recent article in Rolling Stone magazine does a better job than I ever could.)

Insights from the University of Amsterdam on the development of their first MOOC (to be launched 20 February 2013).

For-profit colleges are having a rough go of it these days. Just this week, Everest College (a branch of Corinthian Colleges) was forced to shut down operations in Milwaukee after only two years, during which it burned through two presidents. In my own state, Attorney General Coakley has announced a broader investigation into various for-profit providers in the wake of the abrupt closure of American Career Institutes.

One of the scholarship fund-raising activities my University hosts is an event called “Class Acts.” It’s a talent night where faculty and staff put on an evening of entertainment, and all proceeds from the ticket sales go towards Entrance Scholarships. It’s a fantastic evening, often resulting in many surprises – who knew that our registrar was an Opera singer, or that one of our librarians participates in poetry slams?

There seems to be a good deal of chatter in the system about students eventually (or sooner) ditching laptops for tablets. Today, a student tablet is mostly synonymous with a student iPad - but maybe that will change in the future. (Are you seeing your students carrying around Android devices?)

What do we or should we consider open access?

In the sticky, sweltering heat of late summer, I wrote a little post called “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dissertation,” which translated my writing struggles into a therapeutic list of writing tips. This post was written as I despairingly grappled with many of the negative emotions that can accompany slogging through a long form project like a dissertation (guilt, self-loathing, and a healthy dose of but I don’t wanna, primarily).

I have been feeling fragmented lately, and I’ve generated a hypothesis for why I feel this way that maybe others out there can relate to. Let me start at the beginning. Lo those many years ago my PhD was officially conferred, and I had a baby soon after. At the time I decided to step away from the traditional academic route, since with a husband six years further along in an academic career I just didn’t have the desire to balance a second academic career track with our new family.