Blogs

Every educator knows the wonderful feeling when a student who hadn’t shown much suddenly catches fire. Day 3 was devoted to students like that. Even though I usually suffer pretty awful conference fatigue by the third day, this was a wonderful way to wrap it up. In various ways, nearly everything was about ways to include students who sometimes get excluded.

Here at Gradhacker, we've written about online identity and the use of Twitter before. In this post, I thought I'd tackle less of the "how to use Twitter" and move into the idea of leveraging the power of Twitter to improve your online presence and academic identity. I also can resist making new words with "tw" in the front of them.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are getting lots of press. The 3/4/12 issue of the NYTimes declares that "Instruction for Masses Knocks Down Campus Walls". 160,000 learners participate in Stanford's AI course, which begets a whole new crop of MOOCs in everything from natural language processing to game theory.

Creating safe space to fail and be fearless for my kids. How can we create those same space in higher education?

It’s still too early in the semester for my students to have handed anything in for me to grade, but at the point where lectures are still pretty rote. I finished revising a paper this week, resubmitted, and realized I don’t have any other looming deadlines that desperately need to be met. While there are always thing that can be done, there was nothing pressing that needed doing.

This morning, I happened to hear a story on NPR about peer-to-peer car-sharing. Folks (those mentioned in the story were university students) become members of an organization. Some join to be able to rent privately-owned cars on an hourly basis, others to make their personal vehicles available in return for up to 60% of rental fees. The central organization (company) takes care of member screening (for credit-worthiness, a clean driving record, etc.) and all the administrative overhead.

Here is where law, policy and technology get interesting: When can a government entity shut down service in the name of social order? Some might raise the bar of the question and ask: Should a government entity have the ability to shut down a communication service? If so, what is the "test," i.e. under what circumstances? The inquiry gets even better: Who gets to the define and set the bar?

Go to enough panels, and you start to detect themes.