Lashon hora, microaggression, and the academic asshole
There are three forms of social aggression that can infect an academic department or college and be hard to root out. ((This analysis applies more generally at workplaces, but most of my working life has been in academia, and I’ll restrict my assertions to what I know best.)) I have been mulling these for a […]
Open-source ed tech software wish-list
In response to the LTI App Bounty challenge issued yesterday by several LMS companies, here is my wish-list for software that has a simple function, does not yet exist, but should: A mashup of the Creative Commons search tool, Zotero, and simple image editing that would allow one to search for a CC-licensed/PD image, snag […]
Quick review of Jeff Selingo’s “College (Un)bound”
Jeff Selingo’s new book, College (Un)bound, came out last week. Very brief version of this post: buy it if you want a compilation of good reporting on higher education. You should expect to enjoy it as long as you bring the salt shaker for when Selingo becomes prescriptive.
“Industrial-era education” as rhetorical whipping boy
I am starting a local chapter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Metaphors. Part of my motivation is the release of another Dan Brown novel. But it didn’t hurt my motivation to read the awful thumbnail history in Arthur Levine’s column this week on teachers unions. Teachers’ unions are under siege nationwide…. What’s […]
Sherman’s style note: An algorithm is not personal
Style note to education beat reporters: an algorithm is not “personalization” of education, no matter how many people make the claim. As computerized algorithms currently exist, here are the things that an algorithm cannot identify in an educational context: An algorithm does not know when to pull a student aside at a quiet moment to ask […]