Blogs

The big secret amongst many of us who work in online learning is that we are not all that wild about online courses. Sure, we think online courses can be great, and can fill an important need, but what really gets us excited is learning.

Should first-year students be assigned shared readings about adaptation to climate change? And if they were, what would that mean for curriculum?

Privacy is a fluid construct. People created privacy. We shape it, re-write it, rail against and/or for it. The social rules that dictate privacy are inherently individualized and collectively nebulous. Privacy is not rigid. However, when it comes to conversing about privacy and social media, there seem to be severely polarized viewpoints: those who use privacy as a blockade against using social media versus those who use social media without feeling compelled to protect themselves.

I once attended a seminar presented by the National Endowment for the Humanities on the Philosophy of Math. As an economist teaching in a math department, I was obviously the participant with the most unusual background, as most of the other participants were philosophers of math, many teaching in philosophy departments. While there, I recall one woman discussing the question of “is there a middle number?” Since there is no highest or lowest number, the question became whether there is a middle number. Her conclusion was that there is, indeed, a middle number, and that number is zero.

Plenty of folks see the move to digital textbooks as "inevitable." After all, more and more people are buying e-books and e-readers. Yet college students in particular continue to turn up their noses to digital textbooks. What assumptions are we making that lead us to think that digital textbooks are what students want, let alone need?

Yesterday was the kick-off for our campus celebration of Black History Month. After a wonderful introduction by the Provost, a colleague in the History department gave an impassioned, scholarly, engaging presentation that asked the question: what should Black History Month mean to us?

“Why don’t we just automate all of our routine mail?” It all started so innocently, with such a seemingly logical question...

Which is it, collaboration or groupthink? And does the myth of the solitary scholar actually hurt us? We need to be more open on how we collaborate in higher education, even when we don't mean to.