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The academic life

O brave new university, / That has such MOOCs in’t!

As we head into the second half of Hybrid Pedagogy’s MOOC MOOC, I thought I’d talk about the practices, principles, benefits of MOOCs using some of my favorite characters in all of pop culture. The basic principle: the ultimate learner-centered environment The most important thing to understand about Massive Open Online Courses is that they […]

Affordances of MOOCs

There’s a very cleverly-constructed MOOC about MOOCs this week, MOOC MOOC, and while my days are going to be crazy this week workwise, I’m trying to dip in as much as I can to get a handle on the chaotic discussion. At the end of the second day Athabaska University MOOC organizer/connectivist George Siemens wrote, […]

Dude, where’s my psychohistory?

In a feature story for Nature at the beginning of the month, Laura Spinney writes about the latest generation of academics hoping to quantify historical patterns and make universal claims about “cliodynamics,” as U Conn’s Peter Turchin hopes to call his work. We’ve seen this movie before as quantitative social science history in the 1960s, cliometrics in the […]

Faculty ROI: recalibrating your time before the semester begins

If you’re a faculty member on a standard U.S. academic calendar and anything like me, this week you are thinking at least a little about the new semester. (If you finished all your semester planning and are enjoying the day at the beach, why are you reading my blog right now??) Before the summer and […]

Lessons of Sullivan’s reinstatement

“That’s the reason they’re called lessons,” the Gryphon remarked: “because they lessen from day to day.”–Alice in Wonderland. Congratulations to the University of Virginia, which restored some hope to higher education today with the reinstatement of Teresa Sullivan as president. In turn, I hope people will understand how local these events were, despite being interpreted […]