Blogs

I've found that the end of 2012/beginning of 2013 has brought some changes to a number of services that I rely on for my Grad Student productivity/teaching/ writing/etc. Since it's always hard to keep up with tech changes (especially when the pace of change seems to be daily, even hourly), I thought I'd share a brief round-up of the news that has been of interest or of use recently.

This week I wrote about how much money I sent to Amazon in 2012 to support my digital book (audio and e-book) habit. The grand total was just shy of a thousand bucks.

In college, I don’t remember spending much time worrying about syllabi. They’d typically be about a page, and would include the professor’s name, office number, office hours, the course title and number, sometimes a brief description of the topic of the course, a list of major (graded) assignments, some due dates, a list of required books, and maybe a late paper policy. Many of them looked like they had been copied from copies from years before, and they may have.

Three years ago when I uploaded a slide deck to SlideShare, it was the go-to site for presentation sharing. In the years following that initial upload, I've shared a handful of my slides. Unfortunately, the SlideShare interface has suffered from feature creep. The interface has gone from being simple and user-friendly to feeling clunky. Sharing slides with SlideShare just wasn't worth my time. I had to find an alternative…and then I stumbled upon Speaker Deck.

Earlier this month, the American Historical Association announced the anything-but-shocking discovery that tenured men benefit more from marriage than their female counterparts. My female friends and I long ago noticed that women at the top of the academic hierarchy rarely have more than one child and a marriage in the present tense. Scott Jaschik scrutinized the higher statistical propensity for academic women to form endogamous marriages with another Ph.D. Academic men pick partners more willing or better able to fulfill Ruth’s biblical pledge, “whither thou goest, I shall go.”

Are today's MOOCs the netbooks of 2009? Remember the netbook craze? We were all going to replace are overly expensive and bulky laptops with cheap and light netbooks.

We recently revealed the results of one of our survey questions, “What Surprised You When You First Started Working in Higher Education” After the most common answer, “the politics,” next on the list was the slow pace of accomplishing change in higher education.

Now that I know how to run my peer-driven learning course, I need to figure out where is best to do it.