This is what Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley said on the Senate floor on the proposed TransPacific Partnership: “We are creating a structure of a group of seven very poor nations with very low wages, five affluent nations with higher wages, and think about the difference between running an operation in Malaysia or Mexico, with a…
The Conversation is an Australian website that seeks to synthesize academic and journalistic inquiry in order to provide very thoughtful commentary of Australian and international issues. Its mission statement includes the following principles: to inform public debate with knowledge-based journalism that is responsible, ethical and supported by evidence; to unlock the knowledge of researchers and academics to…
In a recent post to her blog, Diane Ravitch has reported on the ongoing effort to unionize the teachers in Detroit’s charter schools. At five of those schools, the AFT has held successful unionization campaigns. But when they attempted to organize the teachers at the seven University Prep Schools managed by Detroit 90/90, the school…
This is another guest post from Victoria Scott, an art historian. _________________________ I moved from Vancouver, Canada, via St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Binghamton, New York, population 47,376, to begin doctoral studies in art history at SUNY Binghamton August 8, 2001. I had been accepted at Cambridge and the Courtauld, but only Binghamton had offered funding:…
This is a guest post by Victoria Scott, an art historian with considerable experience as an adjunct faculty member. _________________________ Dimidium facti qui coepit habet: sapere aude, incipe. (Half done, she who hath begun: Dare to be wise, begin.) Horace, First Book of Epistles The two biggest obstacles to organizing scholars—graduate students, adjuncts, and…
Replace “technologies” with “reforms” and “economic” with “educational,” in Paul Krugman’s New York Times column today and he could be writing about our schools and colleges. He claims, “the whole digital era, spanning more than four decades, is looking like a disappointment. New technologies have yielded great headlines, but modest economic results. Why?” He goes…
A recent, relatively short article by Joshua Bolkan published in Campus Technology broadly describes a new initiative at the University of Colorado at Boulder: “The University of Colorado Boulder has gone public with its recent adoption of an open access policy. “As a result of the new policy, the university will have ‘nonexclusive, worldwide license to the…
This week, University World News includes two items on climate-change research. The first is a summary of a news article that appeared in Science: “The Australian government’s controversial move to host a think tank headed by noted global warming sceptic Bjørn Lomborg has unraveled-–for now. But Australia’s education minister has vowed to find a new…
I just read an article on the Huffington Post blog titled “MOOC 4.0: The Next Revolution in Learning and Leadership.” The article is written by Otto Scharmer. Here is his Wikipedia biography, which has apparently been taken largely from his own website: “Claus Otto Scharmer (born 1961) is an American economist, Senior Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute…