For those of interested in open education and alternative publishing methods for faculty, please see the January newsletter for Writing Commons (below). Extending the argument I made in Open Textbook Publishing, this note reports our total count for online readers: 1,277,591 users! users for 2013. Also, please vote for the Aaron Swartz Award for Best Webtext for…
This week Richard Vedder, an Ohio State economist who runs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, and his student, Christopher Denhart, ran a provocative piece in the Wall Street Journal on “How the College Bubble Will Pop.” They argued “the benefits of a degree are declining while costs rise.” Looking at earning potential, Professor…
My grandfather, a businessman, never understood why two of his daughters, both musicians, married college professors. They’d never make any money, he said, and that would surely lead to unhappiness. A bit more than a decade ago, I began to make the transition from businessman to college professor. Though I loved my store and cafe,…
In recent blogs and a brief article in Academe, Open Textbook Publishing, I argued that faculty are wise to embrace their power as authors in the digital age, that they no longer need to rely on publishers: Thanks to inexpensive or free publishing tools and the ubiquitous nature of the web, the faculty can assume…
Bethany Brookshire (perhaps better known in the blogosphere as SciCurious) has posted moving personal musings on her experience “failing” as an academic scientist and of being failed by the system that trained her to be one. She notes that grant-writing was the canary in the career coal mine for her. While she loved doing research,…
No one is entirely sure if it began as a joke, but someone tweeted ahead of the New Year about how “cool” it was that the United States would be celebrating its 2014th birthday. Huffington Post published a very brief post that included the tweet with no editorial comment. A slew of people then posted…
Yesterday, I ventured out of the house—just barely beyond the front doorway—just enough to confirm that I preferred to remain inside. I do not have a baseline for what is “too cold,” but when I become cognizant of the individual hairs inside my nostrils, it is too cold for me. “Polar Vortex” is a wonderful…
At many American colleges and universities, the athletic program is something like a machine that runs unto itself – parochial and inward looking, defensive, and quite separate from the academic program. While athletics support a residential learning experience, the number of student athletes contributing to a balanced admissions class, the win/loss record, and the ability…
As the snow piles up and the Arctic Vortex descends on most of the continental United States, we can probably all use something heart-warming to read. Jerry Coleman passed away today at age 89. He may not be a household name nationally, but elderly and diehard Yankees fans will remember him as a solid second-baseman…
As writing in the twenty-first century increasingly takes place in digital spaces, where keystrokes are seamlessly translated into oceans of bytes, Writing Studies finds itself with a vast resource of data not previously imagined, explored, or applied: Big Data. As an open and informal round-table style event founded in curiosity, we would like to invite…