Blogs

I’m a car person as you may have gathered from previous blogs. But it actually makes good sense to be an economist who also happens to be a car person given the important role that the automobile industry has played and continues to play, for good or bad, in our economy.

The 126th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association featured nearly two dozen sessions featuring work in ‘digital history’ as well as a THATCamp that remarkably included over one hundred participants. By comparison, two years ago in San Diego the self-identified digital historians managed to fit around one table at a restaurant.

Welcome to the StratEDgy blog! We -- Margaret Andrews and Dayna Catropa -- have both worked in business and education and find the intersection of the two irresistible -- and increasingly important.

If you know what “middle skills” are, you’re nearly as nerdy as I am. They’re the hot new thing in discussions of both economic development and community colleges.

University of Florida Architecture professor Charlie Hailey writes about a Fulbright visit to Macedonia.

I am going to go ahead and blame the 1980s. Namely, the educational push in those days to "boost children's self-esteem." I am going out on a limb here and guess that most of our Gradhacker readers were told repeatedly and often that they were smart, talented writers, brilliant speakers, etc. Yes, school came easy to us, and for this we were praised. And then we became praise junkies: always anticipating what the teacher wanted in order to get a hit. Fast-forward to graduate school: suddenly, there is no way to anticipate what the teachers want. Because they want us to think for ourselves. And thinking for ourselves means putting out those half-baked ideas to get ripped to shreds constructively criticized. Because we've been trained like Pavlov's dogs to equate criticism as an assault on our intelligence, we freak out. So today's post is dedicated to moving beyond this destructive pattern and learning to embrace the criticism in order to grow as people and as scholars.

The University System of Georgia which governs 35 public colleges and universities recently announced its plan to consolidate eight institutions into four in order to better serve students. Many stakeholders were disappointed by the clandestine nature and pace with which these decisions were made and are concerned about the possible consequences, many of which are yet unknown.

The new collection of essays, Debates in Digital Humanities, highlights how important transparency will be for academia going forward.