Blogs

Course evaluations: everyone knows them and uses them, but does everyone know what are they good for? Opinions are very much split on how to evaluate the evaluation. University teachers differ from university administrators, for example, when they assign importance to the results of course evaluations.

Are any of you planning to buy Microsoft's new Surface tablet? Which model interests you more, the Surface with Windows RT or the Surface with Windows 8 Pro?

This is not the first hurricane we’ve weathered here in Richmond. It’s not even the first hurricane that’s disrupted classes, or that I’ve blogged about. Last year our power was out for four days with Irene; Isabel, in 2003, closed my campus for a week. Gaston, which was only a tropical storm by the time it got here in 2004, flooded downtown Richmond and all the roads between my home and campus; it took me two hours to get home from campus on the first day of classes that year as I sought an unflooded route (and, failing to find one, simply drove through the least-flooded street I could find).

In our knowledge society, research universities are key actors that can make national innovation systems more competitive. This task, however, is not easy in some Latin American countries and not only because they have a significantly lower per capita GDP than those countries with the top 100 universities. Building research universities implies concentrating funds in a handful of institutions. In a context of scarce resources and a mass education policy, this funding design may exacerbate conflict in the allocation process. So, from a political perspective it is not as feasible for Latin America to build world-class universities. Nonetheless, they should make the effort and thus close the advanced technology gap.

To give in to our grievances is to abandon our most precious power, the fact that we can exert individual choice and act according to our own consciences.

Will this major weather event provide evidence for the resilience or the fragility of our postsecondary systems, which are increasingly reliant on power and bandwidth to operate?

Like about 70 million other people, we’re in the path of Hurricane Sandy. As of this writing, we still have power, but after last year’s catastrophe, we’re expecting to lose it for a while. (If this week’s blogging gets spotty, that’s why.) Given some warning, we spent the weekend preparing.

In which the power of commercial fiction is harnessed for pedagogical ends.