Warning: Trying to access array offset on true in /home/shermand/www/www/wp-content/themes/hybrid/library/functions/styles.php on line 77

Student services and higher-ed unbundling

Over the weekend, a few papers on higher education gave me mental whiplash: Andrew Kelly and Rick Hess’s Beyond Retrofitting, a brief for unbundling of higher education; and Sara Goldrick-Rab et al. on very tentative evidence of success by Single Stop USA. (Instead of heading to a white paper that will quickly become obsolete, I […]

Silly season in education politics

It’s a Friday in early August, so why not have crazy education news? You’ve already destroyed our district, but could we at least pretend to open our doors this year? After months of public disavowal by Pennsylvania politicians of any obligation to fund Philadelphia’s schools adequately, Philadelphia superintendent William Hite gave notice yesterday that if […]

Pictura invisibilis collegio artium digital

In the 1960s, Derek Price and Diana Crane popularized a description of the informal knowledge sharing of in-groups as “invisible colleges,” professional networks that share unwritten or hard-to-describe ways of working inside a field, a circle of teaching that by its informal nature excludes those outside the network. The concept of an invisible college is […]

One Week, Better Tools (spoof)

While several of my friends have been working hard this week on developing a new digital-humanities tool at One Week | One Tool: A Digital Humanities Barnraising, I’ve been spoofing their original Ideascale site to get feedback on options Monday and Tuesday with One Week, Better Tools. Or as I explain on the site: We’re […]

Michael Olneck on badges

U. Wisconsin professor emeritus and sociologist Michael Olneck wrote me the following in response to my 2011 blog entry on badges and exchange credentials: I was reading your September 25, 2011 blog, “‘Credentialized badge’” is an oxymoron?,” in which you identify Scouting merit badges (and associated ranks) with “nominal,” rather than “exchange-based” credentials. I think […]