Opinion

In response to yesterday’s post about the seeming invisibility of the social sciences, a commenter asked me why, if I value the social sciences so highly, I strongly advise against people getting Ph.D.’s in them. Shortly after that, I saw Michael Berube’s essay about graduate admissions, in which he kinda, sorta suggested that they should be cut back, but not unless the departments are willing, and it’s complicated, and anyway aren’t we all “awesome.”

Technology. Even the word is enough to send some TAs into a tizzy. After all, some TAs' worst nightmares concern pouring over a presentation for hours, only to have a faulty internet connection, damaged jump drive, or other “helpful” technology fail in front of their class. In this post, we will take up where our bold GradHacker forerunners, Andrea Zellner ("I'm a Digital Grad in a Digital World"), Ashley Wiersma ("3 Ways to Hack your Class with Google+"), and Steph Hedge ("Teaching with Blogs") have gone before us. Today, we’re tackling technologies to take the more ho-hum tasks of course management to the next level.

There's some bad instruction going around regarding dialog tags.

Scanning the headlines today, I came across this article about Oxford University turning off Google Docs. Having made a friend at Oxford of a colleague in IT there, Tony Brett, I looked at my watch, recognized that it was noon for him, emailed him the link with a subject line: Tell Me More! To which Tony immediately replied with this more extended discussion of the technical security rational for the administrative decision.

The college sports group is "reviled and legally besieged," but after 30 years of tilting at its windmills, Murray Sperber believes it is legally and politically invulnerable.

Carolyn Foster Segal discusses the lessons higher education might learn from the sad story of the student who sued her university over a C+ grade.

STEM initiatives are all the rage in academia these days. They’re popular with policymakers, who see them as a form of high-end workforce development; they’re popular with parents, who see them as high-end job placement; and they’re somewhat popular with students. At the community college level, developmental math has long been -- and continues to be -- a major challenge for graduation rates; it continues, rightly, to receive substantial attention.

Whenever I teach an introductory lesson on “gender” in my first-year international affairs and international relations classes, I find myself prefacing my explanation of “feminism” with the familiar “Feminism is not about man-hating. Feminists are concerned with both men and women,” in order to fend off the usual hostile responses from both male and female students.