Blogs

Economics is sometimes called "the Dismal Science," and I admit that I try to counteract this by bringing entertaining topics to my Economics as well as to my Math classes. My hope is that these topics will leave the student with a "hook" that will help them remember what was said.

Totally excited to see On Being Presidential: A Guide for College and University Leader (with an IHE tie-in) available in paper and e-book. When I clicked on the ad on IHE today I was taken to this site. $40 bucks for the paper version, and $19.99 for the e-book.

This is a GradHacker post by Trent M Kays. The end of the semester is a finite thing. It will happen. It comes every year right about the time most graduate students don’t think they can handle anymore work. I’ve always welcomed the end of the semester, and I’ve always lamented the end of the semester. If you think this attitude is, much like the Shakespearean tradition, contrarian or, perhaps, oxymoronic, then you are correct. However, the idea of the break is nothing to celebrate. Well, at least not yet anyways. It is something to be avoided and disdained because we aren’t done yet. At my university, like many universities, the official last day of class was over this past week, and while we often take that last day of class as a celebratory day, our dilemma is far from over. We still need to grade, meet with students who wish to argue about their grades, meet with our advisors about classes or work for the spring, meet about future meetings, etc. This crunch time is perhaps the most stressful of the entire semester: the last week, the last hurrah, the last push toward our break from insanity.

An "unconventional" Student Affairs Unconference is a fairly provocative way of framing an event.

Last week I attended a workshop on “backwards” course design: planning courses by identifying the big ideas or main concepts that we want students to master, and then creating assignments by which students can demonstrate that they have mastered these concepts. As basic as this might sound, it’s a radical departure from the default method of syllabus construction in which we cram the books we’ve already ordered into the available weeks of the semester. None of this is new to me, but I need to be reminded every semester.

I love this question. A longtime reader writes: I was chatting with a colleague yesterday. As we talked, a common theme emerged: neither of us has found a way to do the following: 1) Easily and collaboratively share and revise documents or other materials on our college’s content management system 2) Easily and collaboratively share and revise documents or other materials on our college’s course management system (or on other open-source course management systems used on campus) e.g create a moodle course for a particular committee or task force and use this as a space to get some collaborative work done on a project.

I'm in the middle of reading (actually listening to) Daniel Yergin's amazing new book The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World. Are any of you also reading The Quest? (It is 816 pages, or almost 30 hours in audio - and worth every second).

Stanford's experiment this fall, offering 3 computer science courses online for free, appears to have been wildly successful, and the school plans to offer more courses next term. Will this program change how we think about opencourseware?