Blogs

When ifttt (it's lowercase, so it has to be cool, right?) first appeared on the social tech scene, I took a gander and then I moved on. Thankfully, I know enough about companies with unique names to not put them on permanent ignore. ifttt (I was going to make a bell hooks reference about capitalization…it didn't work.) is all about figuring out the connections between "if this then that." The functionality of ifttt is built around tasks, actions, and channels. For example, let's say you wanted to save your Instagram photos into your Dropbox account. With ifttt, it's simple, the community has already created that particular recipe.

Some topics never go away. Collegiality and its evil twin, incivility, is one of them.

Most of us have been there. Standing in line at the annual conference of [insert national association of scholars of some discipline or region here] and protesting the length of the time to register. Wondering why it takes the conference committee so long to accept or reject our abstract. Locating typos in the conference program. Complaining about the seemingly mismatched papers on a panel. But have you ever sat on the other side of that registration table? Considered volunteering for or organizing a conference yourself?

What Money Can't Buy arrives at an opportune time as we debate on campus our relationship to larger market forces. The prevailing ethos in nonprofit higher ed seems to be well aligned with Sandel's central thesis, namely that markets are not neutral arbitrators of relationships, but instead influence and impact the exchanges in which market mechanisms dominate.

Why higher education, particularly in the humanities, will, by definition, never be efficient, or at least efficient enough.

June 8th marked the end of the MITx free pilot course, Circuits and Electronics, which welcomed more registrants than all of MIT’s living alumni (122,000 as of January 2012). So after all the hype, what can we learn? I tracked down one person who actually made it through to the end and passed – and decided to conduct an anonymous ‘focus group of one.’

It’s an epidemic. Indeed, it’s probable that when spamming scholars, the owners of sham periodicals pay attention to whether the recipients’ academic interests are relevant to the journal’s disciplinary focus. Some scholars are even placed on editorial boards even though they have not given their consent.

I have already stated on multiple occasions that I am a musicals fan, preferably Broadway but I’m also passionate about college theater, middle and high school theater, not-for-profit theater, and off-Broadway theater.