Blogs

It's almost time for the NASPA Annual Conference. As usual, I've browsed through the conference schedule for those sessions that relate back to this blog. This year's slate of sessions features an impressive line-up of topics.

While the enrollment ratio in Africa still hovers around 5 percent, with considerable disparity by countries, the continent has made remarkable strides in expanding programs, liberalizing the higher education system, and diversifying the delivery mode. Norwegian development cooperation has been known for its long-term commitment, shared ownership and generous support to capacity building in higher education in Africa. The fact that the organization has organized events in different countries of the region to engage all the stakeholders is a further testimony to these qualities.

Any book written by a humanities professor defending a traditional liberal arts education had better be well-written and incisively argued. It had better have some verve to it, something original to bring to the table.

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.