Opinion

This week, as I was starting to feel myself again after an intense bout of the flu, Ben came down with it. I had a comparatively light work week, so even when he wasn't that sick I was able to spend time with him, watching TV, talking when he felt up to it, and making tea, the closest thing to food he could tolerate for a few days.

Borrowing from Ta-Nehisi Coates, I'm looking for help understanding this phenomenon as it pertains to higher ed.

Brett Foster is making lists of his goals, and thinking about what would be realistic.

Predictions of the collapse of higher education amid financial and technological tumult fail to account for our desire to be with, you know, actual people, writes Louis Betty.

This month, students in my January course have been reading about books and culture. This week, as we’re wrapping things up, they speculated about what the world of books might look like in ten years, and came up with some intriguing scenarios and proposals. As I left the building where the class meets I chatted with some humanities faculty and mentioned what we’d been talking about. They seemed at first apprehensive, then surprised and relieved that students predicted a future for books.

When academic Twitter starts sounding too much like academia.

CourseSmart is the world’s largest platform for eTextbooks and digital course materials. CourseSmart has over 40,000 titles from more than 50 publishers and over 3.5 million student and faculty users. CourseSmart Analytics provides faculty with a platform to develop insight into how students are interacting with the digital texts that they assign. Robust analytics seems to be the logical next step of the move from print to digital in curricular materials.

One of the challenges to teaching with technology is helping students figure out the "who", "what", and "how" of internet messages. As a grad instructor of “Human Diversity, Power, and Schools”, a course that centers on issues of difference, this challenge coincides with a key concept: social construction, or the idea that dominant groups’ norms are positioned as natural, to the exclusion of non-dominant groups. I have stumbled into memes as one fruitful teaching tool for helping students to uncover the ways mass media shapes how we view ourselves, others, and the world around us.