academhack

I have finally returned from my end of month traveling and am getting back to work on my current project (more on that later). But for now I wanted to join an ongoing conversation, about what was one of the most productive academic conferences I have been to: THATCamp. First, let me say mad props [...]

No secret to the readers of this site that I am a bit of an evangelist for Creative Commons. And those who follow the work of danah boyd know that she filed her dissertation under a creative commons license. Despite the fact that the CC license is easy to use, some institutions have been weary [...]

One of the things I consistently tell grad students is that they need to start developing an online profile now, their future, and the future of the profession depends on this. While already established faculty (read ones with secure full time jobs) can afford to ignore the developing intellectual landscape the coming generation of scholars [...]

To be honest I was only half serious when I started this rant on Twitter yesterday. You see my Thursday’s are really long, my first class starts at 10:00am and my last class ends at 10:00pm, so I try to keep myself entertained and mentally active. Twitter I discovered is a perfect tool for this. [...]

(A story of Twitter, academia, and old journalism trying to be new but failing.)
Okay first read this article on CNN about the new whitehouse.gov website, okay you can actually just skim the article and skip to the last three paragraphs. Yes, that’s me being quoted in that article, and yes you are correct that [...]

I have been thinking a lot lately about Howard Rheingold’s “Attention 101” and “Attention 102” videos, this is somewhat inspired by his recent reposting and discussion as he begins class, but also because I am also beginning a new semester. I think regardless of what discipline or subject matter we teach, we could do with [...]

The cycle goes something like this: textbook companies make a lot of money selling books to college students, used bookstores cut in on profits by buying and selling these books to students, textbook companies raise prices to recoup profits and publish new editions every year attempting to muscle out the used book market. But, then [...]

Sometimes you write a post thinking it is no big deal, just a reference to something, and all of a sudden gets more interest than you would think. So it went with the prior post about Boston College no longer offering campus email accounts to students.
In my mind I thought this was a no-brainer. So [...]

File this under bad pedagogy and irony, a bit like teaching a statistics class but not letting the students use any numbers.

And the word for obvious conclusion of the week goes to John William Pope Center for Higher Education which concludes that sharing syllabi online is a good idea. Really? You’re kidding sharing knowledge actually helps?
Seriously is there a reason to not do this? Are you really going to suggest that education is fostered by being [...]