Opinion

Last week, IHE featured a story about a prominent professor at Texas Tech whose bid for a deanship was denied on the basis of his stated opposition to the tenure system. This week, a court upheld the termination of an HR director for stating her opposition to gay marriage. Although one case is much more sympathetic than the other, they really address the same issue. Should administrators be allowed to raise policy objections in public?

Technology is important to the grad student life nowadays. With Twitter being a major form of networking, and constant online updates running our lives, it's important to have technology to make it easier and faster. Here are some tech gift suggestions from our authors.

Say you are about to initiate a new edtech project. Maybe you have been asked by your leadership to roll out a new service, say a MOOC, a lecture capture rollout, a media management project, or a new help desk, or a new blended learning program. Or perhaps you are initiating and leading a project, and you need a way to communicate the rationale and frame the resources needed to your end users and stakeholders.

Thirty years ago, my family went to Disney World for the first time. I was five and my brother turned three while we were away on our trip. We stayed in Daytona Beach, visited Cape Canaveral, watched the Space Shuttle Columbia launch from our balcony, hung out at the beach, and made the aforementioned trip to Disney and the newly-opened Epcot Center.

As I write at my computer, my nine-year-old daughter is on Skype with a friend who lives on the other side of the country. Together, they are working on a web page that showcases their passion for hamsters. She figured out how to construct her webpage using the documentation on Google Sites. She’s a pro at finding info using Wikipedia, she loves searching for images using Google, she’s even put together some crude computer animations.

It's been a rough semester. Wishing you peace and comfort and joy during these holidays.

MOOCs were surely the most talked-about trend in education technology this year. Part 5 of my Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012 series.

Corruption is one of the main afflictions of Russian society, especially in academia. At first glance, younger students seem to be more corrupt than their older colleagues. Our research shows that students who have just arrived at universities hear more about bribery at universities (83%) than students who are nearly finished with their studies (50%). The youngest students describe every possible means used, dividing them into monetary (cash) and non-monetary forms (alcohol, confectionary items, household durable goods and mobile phones).