BY MONICA OWENS Privatization of online higher education is on the rise. For-profit online education corporations like Academic Partnerships, Kaplan, Wiley, Pearson, and Blackboard contract with public and private nonprofit institutions to provide digital platforms for educational content, recruit students, manage enrollment, facilitate the development of course materials, and more. While the use of digital…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH I know that the artificial intelligence and the humanoid robots are on the horizon, if not already upon us, but this image is still unsettling: Getty, Matt Cardy This explanatory caption was provided by Atlantic’s Photos of the Week for May 11, 2018, compiled by Alan Taylor: Engineered Arts prosthetic expert…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This is a photo taken in 1937 in Prague of a mechanism called an “elevator desk”: In a period in which Varidesks have become very popular and the emphasis on ergonomic design has become commonplace, this photo may seem very anachronistic. But, I have to admit that I find something absolutely…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH What follows is the lead item in last night’s Overnight Technology newsletter from The Hill: Highlights from Zuckerberg’s Interviews: CNN: Zuckerberg said the company was open to some regulation. “Actually, I’m not sure we shouldn’t be regulated.” “I actually think the question is more ‘What is the right regulation?’ rather than ‘Yes…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Our relationship with technology—and, in particular, technological advancements that are on the horizon and that promise major and not entirely predictable changes in how we conduct our daily lives—has always been ambivalent at best. But the newsletter teaser for an article in the Los Angeles Times on the inevitability of human…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of a petition to the Higher Learning Commission signed by elected officials and community leaders from across Indiana and the Midwest, joined by thousands of faculty members and students at colleges and universities across Indiana and the Midwest. The petition calls on the Commission to reject…
BY TARIQ KHAN My name is Tariq Khan. I am a father of three young children, a U.S. Air Force Veteran, and a PhD candidate in History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I spend most of my time juggling parenting duties with researching and writing my dissertation, though I can sometimes be found…
BY JOERG TIEDE Over the course of the last year, targeted online harassment of faculty has emerged as a significant threat to academic freedom. Fueled by websites such as Professor Watchlist, Campus Reform, and College Fix, campaigns of threats and harassment are directed against faculty members for what they are reported to have said in…
BY NANCY LONG In 2014, the AAUP joined a nationwide effort to obtain an exemption to the copyright laws that protect authors’ rights to fair use in the digital age. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) imposes criminal and civil liability on creators who circumvent technologies like encryption that protect copyrighted works. This poses a problem…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The following excerpts are from Ben Tarnoff’s article, “Tech’s Push to Teach Coding Isn’t about Kid’s Success—It’s about Cutting Wages,” which has been published in The Guardian in September: Computer science courses for children have proliferated rapidly in the past few years. A 2016 Gallup report found that 40% of American…