Blogs

Prior to this year's EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, Pearson announced a new "self-service learning management system (LMS)" called OpenClass. Billed as being completely free, OpenClass integrates with Google Apps for Education and is available from the Google Apps Marketplace. The user interface (UI) is stunning. It's as if a traditional LMS was given a facelift by the Google Docs team (Note that Google did not create OpenClass). The interface is simple and reminds me of a blog. It's more web 2.0 in look and feel. The top portion of the UI features Gmail, Google Calendar, Gchat, Google Docs, and Skype icons. With such an aesthetically pleasing UI (coupled with useful functionality) I predict that students will love using OpenClass.

October has been tremendously busy. With an estimated 20 or 30 potential posts in my brain queue, I've decided to do a quick post as an introduction to further reflections on everything that has taken place in October. Think of this post as an appetizer or perhaps as an usually large amuse-bouche.

Academics have a weakness for the latest cutting-edge innovations. It’s kind of what we do. And in many cases, that’s a good thing. This week, though, I’ve seen two older ideas come back as new solutions to current issues. They’ve both been out of fashion long enough that they actually seem new, even though they’re anything but.

I was in a late afternoon meeting last Friday with a group of the kind of folks who are likely to be in a late afternoon meeting on a Friday. I think we had a dean and three department chairs there as well as at least two program coordinators—folks, in other words, who do a good bit of service, or who have put in so much time doing service in the past that they are now doing it full-time as administrators. Everyone was breathing that kind of sigh...

Those of us who have been, or are, in graduate school have come across this mantra: publish or perish. What is important about this phrase is not only the unrelenting pressure it puts on graduate students and early career faculty to publish, but the unspoken lack of emphasis it places on teaching

Reading Reamde (Kindle) and Ready Player One (Audible) simultaneously is somewhat of a surreal experience, as both novels feature massively...

‘Flexibility’ is genuinely slippery concept, one that provides some sense of coherence with vagueness. It is also a concept that is a resource to be used in the pursuit of power. I’m most familiar with the concept of flexibility in relationship to the changing nature of production systems. There has been a long debate in Economic Geography, for example, about phenomena like ‘flexible specialization’ and ‘flexible accumulation’. These interrelated concepts have helped scholars and industry analysts make sense of how production systems are evolving to cope with increasingly levels of competitive pressure, the emergence of global value chains, new forms of territorial development, and so on.

A thoughtful correspondent wrote last week to express concern about what she perceived as a growing rift between faculty and...