Search Results for Twitter

The Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age is a new document authored and signed by twelve scholars, technologists, and entrepreneurs including Duke professor and author Cathy Davidson, organizational technologist John Seely Brown, and Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun. It’s been making the rounds among those of us interested in such topics, also receiving coverage at The… read more

I’ve had the pleasure of visiting with a number of classes recently after they’ve read Alien Phenomenology. Very different groups as well, from freshmen to graduate students. A common question that arose in many of these conversations relates to the consequences of object-oriented ontology. This question usually takes a form like, “Doesn’t object-oriented ontology risk turning our attention away from… read more

An article in Business Week has been making the rounds this holiday weekend, The Troubling Dean-to-Professor Ratio. It’s about the top-heaviness of universities and the growth of senior and executive administration. The “money quote,” so to speak, is this: At universities nationwide, employment of administrators jumped 60 percent from 1993 to 2009, 10 times the growth rate for tenured faculty.… read more

Today the Chronicle of Higher Education reports on MLA Job Leaks, an unauthorized, “rogue” website that is republishing the Modern Language Association (MLA) Job Information List (JIL). Currently university departments have to pay to list jobs, and job seekers have to be members of the MLA or the related Association of Departments of English (ADE) or the Association of Departments… read more

I made this stupid joke on Twitter today: The primary innovation in OSX 10.9 will be the move to canine product names. I was referring to Apple’s longstanding tradition of code-naming their OS X releases after “big cats”: Cheetah (the original OS X), Tiger, Lion, Leopard, etc.. The thing is, they’re running out of big cats. I don’t think cougar… read more

Earlier this week, Georgia Tech and eleven other higher education institutions announced their participation in Coursera, a company that hosts online courses. Reactions have been predictably dramatic, as exemplified by Jordan Weissman’s panegyric in the Atlantic, titled The Single Most Important Experiment in Higher Education. I’ll spare observations on the obvious problems with Weissman’s article, like the witless claim that… read more

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not exactly sure what blogging means to me these days. But whether by accident or design, I’ve been avoiding some of the back-and-forth debate that both helps and hinders the work of philosophy online these days. That said, this is one of those back-and-forth response posts, this on answering some of the… read more