Melia Robinson and Melissa Stanger’s “The Most Famous Book in Every State”

This list has been compiled for Business Insider [http://www.businessinsider.com/most-famous-book-in-every-state-2013-10]. I will offer an alternative list shortly. Alabama: To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee Alaska Into the Wild Jan Krakauer Arizona The Bean Trees Barbara Kingsolver Arkansas A Painted House John Grisham California East of Eden John Steinbeck Colorado The Shining Stephen King Connecticut Revolutionary Road…

Executive Summary of the First Paper in the CFHE Series on Online Education and MOOCs

FutureofHigherEd.org • #futureofHE • facebook.com/FutureofHigherEd _________________________ The “Promises” of Online Higher Education: Profits  With so much national focus on the “promises” of online higher education to expand access and to reduce costs, one truth about online higher education rarely mentioned is that it is big—Very Big—business.   Understanding and assessing developments in online higher education require…

Dear Editor/ Dear Diary: Sorry, I’m Blogging

Here is the September report from WordPress to its bloggers. I find some of the numbers absolutely astonishing. After digesting the report, I am all the more appreciative of all of you who have been reading my posts. Since so many people are blogging, it’s very encouraging to know that there are still so many…

A Forthcoming Series of Papers from CFHE: The ‘Promises’ of Online Higher Education: Overview

Promoters of MOOCs and online courses make big promises about the value of this latest trend in higher education. MOOCs and online courses, we are told, will both expand access to higher education and reduce its costs for just about every “stakeholder”–for institutions lacking the resources to provide needed courses, for governments hard-pressed to provide…

Oh Crap, If We Have Lost Rob Schneider, How Can We Ever Win?

This week, several Far Right media outlets have reported that actor/comedian Rob Schneider had declared himself a Republican. Yes, Schneider, the star of Big Stan, The Animal, The Hot Chick, Deuce Bigelow: Male Gigolo, and Deuce Bigelow: European Gigolo, has decided to endorse Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim Donnelly. Said Schneider, “The more I am with…

How about Some Good News—Any Good News

I don’t expect the sources from which I get my news to sugarcoat it or to avoid the unsavory aspects of life for uplifting human-interest stories. But sometimes the bad news does seem to have almost completely crowded out any good news. Consider the following headlines from a late August news summary from Channel 10,…

A Visual Demonstration of the Absurdity of Gerrymandering

Most Progressives, especially in the “Rust Belt” states, have had much reason to regret the failure of the national Democratic Party to generate voter turnout in 2010. During that census year, Republicans secured the governorships and large legislative majorities in many of those states and then gerrymandered districts that have allowed them to maintain 2:1…