This post is a re-presentation/slightly edited version of this post from my own blog where I have lately been discussing my participation in a Coursera MOOC “World Music.” Throw a brick out a window nowadays and you are liable to hit an article about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs); conveniently, The Chronicle of Higher Education has…
This piece, by Debra Leigh Scott, originally appeared on the blog The Homeless Adjunct. It is reposted here with her permission: A few years back, Paul E. Lingenfelter began his report on the defunding of public education by saying, “In 1920 H.G. Wells wrote, ‘History is becoming more and more a race between education and…
Last week, Mitt Romney directed that Obama “take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago.” For good and bad, ‘division and anger’ have always been part of American politics. Take the case of Alexander Hamilton. He was called “Tom S**t” in one New York paper, was accused of having African ancestry…
Four recent incidents have made me aware again of one of those itches it seems impossible to scratch, the valuation of “content” as a product rather than as the culmination of a process. Scholarship, today, becomes simply the thing for sale. The first of these was the resignation of Jonah Lehrer from The New Yorker. The second…
In the August 17 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education is an article by Beth Mole, “The Future of Peer Review in the Humanities is Wide Open.” She focuses on Peter Sigal, a Duke University historian and one of the editors of the Hispanic American Historical Review. His journal is experimenting with an “optional open-review process”: Authors who choose…
I’m a historian, blogger and longtime AAUP member who’s delighted to have the opportunity to post here from time to time on the kinds of issues that concern Academe readers. While I started off blogging about history, I’ve spent the vast majority of my time at my home blog in the last year or so writing…
Christian publishing house Thomas Nelson has pulled David Barton’s book The Jefferson Lies from distribution. According to NPR: “When the concerns came in, from multiple people, and that had weight too, we were trying to sort things out,” said Thomas Nelson Senior Vice President and Publisher Brian Hampton. “Were these matters of opinion? Were they differences…
Could education (higher education in particular) be about to follow the path journalism found itself on, starting just under a decade ago? Could digital possibilities be on the verge of ushering in a new paradigm reflective of what happened to the newspaper business as a result of the rise of the blogosphere? I doubt it.…
Diary reposted and revised from DailyKos Author: Bruce B. Janz, Winter Springs, Florida In Florida, my (adopted) state, we have a “blue ribbon panel” on higher education, appointed by Florida Republican Tea Party governor Rick Scott. It is modeled on the Texas blue ribbon panel, and based on the Heartland Institute’s policy briefs on the issue. For…
Republican candidate-presumptive Mitt Romney recently blasted Barack Obama for suggesting that it takes more than an individual to build a country: To say that Steve Jobs didn’t build Apple, that Henry Ford didn’t build Ford Motor, that Papa John didn’t build Papa John pizza, that Ray Kroc didn’t build McDonald’s, that Bill Gates didn’t build…