Blogs

We’ve stopped in Sandy Hook any number of times over the last few years, driving between Massachusetts and New Jersey. It’s a cute little town just off route 84, about halfway between Danbury and Waterbury. It has several good lunch places, and a lovely upscale toy store in an old house that couldn’t be any more New England-y if it tried. Behind the toy store there’s a creek with several decks overlooking it, and if I remember right, even a mill wheel. The last couple of times we were there, we spent more time than was strictly necessary, just because we liked it so much.

In a previous post we predicted that this year MOOCs will morph into MOCCS (Mid-Sized Online Closed Courses).

I recently read for the first time a book that for many (most?) is a classic: Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines, in its revised edition (2001). I admit that the idea of an ethnography of academic disciplines and their internal codes is a bit narcissistic in the sense that it belongs to the genre of academics studying and writing about academia, but then so is this blog and all the writing about the theories of pedagogy and the analyses of higher education.

Are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) becoming mechanisms for international competition in global higher education? Or are the MOOCs born in the United States (circa 2012) poised to become post-national platforms of higher ed given their cosmopolitan multilingual architects?

Planning on taking some time off between Christmas and New Year's? Looking for some fiction that will accomplish the twin goals of keeping your brain engaged with technology trends while giving yourself a break? I have 4 suggestions.

Part 3 in my end-of-year review of the top ed-tech trends. This one addresses Code Year and the popular notion in 2012 that "everyone should learn to code."

My younger daughter decided against having a birthday party for her latest birthday and asked instead that I take her to the One Direction concert at Madison Square Garden.

When The Dark Knight Rises came out, an improv classmate mentioned having heard that Christian Bale's costume was so elaborate he had to be sealed into it at the beginning of each filming day, necessitating a catheter until the costume was removed. "That's why I'm sticking with improv," another classmate observed. "I'm Batman because I say I am." I was reminded of this exchange the other evening, when a friend and I amused ourselves while waiting for a performance to begin by compiling a list of reasons we prefer improv to "legitimate" theater: