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"April 17, 2011 5 Myths About the 'Information Age' By Robert Darnton Confusion about the nature of the so-called information age has led to a state of collective false consciousness. It's no one's fault but everyone's problem, because in trying to get our bearings in cyberspace, we often get things wrong, and the misconceptions spread so rapidly that they go unchallenged. Taken together, they constitute a font of proverbial non-wisdom. Five stand out: 1. "The book is dead." Wrong: More books are produced in print each year than in the previous year. One million new titles will appear worldwide in 2011. In one day in Britain-"Super Thursday," last October 1-800 new works were published. The latest figures for the United States cover only 2009, and they do not distinguish between new books and new editions of old books. But the total number, 288,355, suggests a healthy market, and the growth in 2010 and 2011 is likely to be much greater. Moreover, these figures, furnished by Bowker, do not include the explosion in the output of "nontraditional" books-a further 764,448 titles produced by self-publishing authors and "micro-niche" print-on-demand enterprises. And the book business is booming in developing countries like China and Brazil. However it is measured, the population of books is increasing, not decreasing, and certainly not dying. 2. "We have entered the information age." This announcement is usually intoned solemnly, as if information did not exist in other ages. But every age is an age of information, each in its own way and according to the media available at the time. No one would deny that the modes of communication are changing rapidly, perhaps as rapidly as in Gutenberg's day, but it is misleading to construe that change as unprecedented. 3. "All information is now available online." The absurdity of this claim is obvious to anyone who has ever done research in archives. Only a tiny fraction of archival material has ever been read, much less di

"January 2, 2011 Academic Library Autopsy Report, 2050 By Brian T. Sullivan "Insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal." -Shakespeare The academic library has died. Despite early diagnosis, audacious denial in the face of its increasingly severe symptoms led to its deterioration and demise. The academic library died alone, largely neglected and forgotten by a world that once revered it as the heart of the university. On its deathbed, it could be heard mumbling curses against Google and something about a bygone library guru named Ranganathan. Although the causes of death are myriad, the following autopsy report highlights a few of the key factors. 1. Book collections became obsolete. Fully digitized collections of nearly every book in the world rendered physical book collections unnecessary. Individual students now pay for subscriptions to any of several major digital-book vendors for unlimited access. The books may be viewed online at any time or downloaded to a portable device. Some colleges have opted for institutional subscriptions to digital-book collections, managed by their information-technology departments. Most of these collections originated in physical libraries, which signed their own death warrants with deals to digitize their books. 2. Library instruction was no longer necessary. To compete with a new generation of search engines, database vendors were forced to create tools that were more user-friendly, or else risk fading into obscurity. As databases became more intuitive and simpler to use, library instruction in the use of archaic tools was no longer needed. Almost all remaining questions could be answered by faculty (see No. 3) or information-technology staff (see No. 4). It was largely the work of academic librarians that led to most of these advances in database technology. 3. Information literacy was fully integrated into the curriculum. As faculty incorporated information literacy into their teaching, it became part of the gener

The Chronicle of Higher Education February 19, 2012 How 'Flipping' the Classroom Can Improve the Traditional Lecture By Dan Berrett Andrew P. Martin loves it when his lectures break out in chaos. It happens frequently, when he asks the 80 students in his evolutionary-biology class at the University of Colorado at Boulder to work in small groups to solve a problem, or when he asks them to persuade one another that the answer they arrived at before class is correct. When they start working together, his students rarely stay in their seats, which are bolted to the floor. Instead they gather in the hallway or in the aisles, or spill toward the front of the room, where the professor typically stands. Mr. Martin, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, drops in on the discussions, asking and answering questions, and hearing where students are stumped. "Students are effectively educating each other," he says of the din that overtakes his room. "It means they're in control, and not me." Enlarge Image How 'Flipping' the Classroom Can Improve the Traditional Lecture 2 Benjamin Rasmussen for The Chronicle Students discuss the relationship between finches' beak sizes and survival rates during Andrew Martin's evolutionary-biology class at the U. of Colorado at Boulder. Such moments of chaos are embraced by advocates of a teaching technique called "flipping." As its name suggests, flipping describes the inversion of expectations in the traditional college lecture. It takes many forms, including interactive engagement, just-in-time teaching (in which students respond to Web-based questions before class, and the professor uses this feedback to inform his or her teaching), and peer instruction. But the techniques all share the same underlying imperative: Students cannot passively receive material in class, which is one reason some students dislike flipping. Instead they gather the information largely outside of class, by reading, watching recorded lectures, or list

"MyEdu & KnowU - Two Approaches to Social Media in Higher Ed Keith Hampson Higher education is trying hard to find the best ways to integrate social media into its practices. They've approached it from a number of angles: marketing, community building, student support, and instruction. Instigators behind the efforts include software vendors looking to build the next edu social platform, colleges, individual educators, and on less formal basis, the students themselves. As of late 2011, there are very few scalable, institution-wide initiatives - but a great deal of isolated experimentation by innovators. The opportunities seem endless, but higher education management professionals are on the lookout for the right approach to make social media work for them today. Not all areas of higher ed will be equally well-suited to the opportunities that social media presents. Of all of the possibilities, integrating social media and instruction may be the most difficult, for example - due to the conflicting properties of social media and higher ed. While social media is particularly well-suited to facilitating open-ended exchanges between people - with no clear or prescribed beginning and end - higher education has clear boundaries (e.g. course duration) and largely predetermined objectives (e.g. syllabi). Social media is user-generated and leaderless. Higher education is top-down and instructor-directed. Social media thrives when there are thousands, if not millions, of users. High volume provides online communities with enough activity and content to ensure that each user finds what and who they want with sufficient frequency. (Although Twitter and Linked In have over 100 million users, only a fraction of the users are of significance to any one user.) On the other hand, higher education instruction typically restricts participation to a single class (e.g. 100 students). This is not to say that higher education won't find ways to use social media for instructi

"The Year Ahead in IT, 2012 January 6, 2012 - 3:00am By Lev Gonick This series of annual Year Ahead articles on technology and education began on the eve of what we now know is one of the profound downturns in modern capitalism. When history is written, the impact of the deep economic recession of 2008-2012 will have been pivotal in the shifting balance of economic and political power around the world. Clear, too, is the reality that innovation and technology as it is applied to education is moving rapidly from its Anglo-American-centered roots to a now globally distributed dynamic generating disruptive activities that affect learners and institutions the world over. Seventy years ago, the Austrian-born Harvard lecturer and conservative political economist Joseph Schumpeter popularized the now famous description of the logic of capitalism, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. The opening of new markets, foreign or domestic … illustrate(s) the same process of industrial mutation - if I may use that biological term - that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. Our colleges and universities, especially those in the United States, are among the most conservative institutions in the world. The rollback of public investment in, pressure for access to, and indeterminate impact of globalization on postsecondary education all contribute to significant disorientation in our thinking about the future of the university. And then there are the disruptive impacts of information technology that only exacerbate the general set of contradictions that we associate with higher education. The faculty are autonomous and constrained, powerful and vulnerable, innovative at the margins yet conservative at the core, dedicated to education while demeaning teaching devoted to liberal arts and yet powerfully vocatio

"The Campus Tsunami By DAVID BROOKS Published: May 3, 2012 Online education is not new. The University of Phoenix started its online degree program in 1989. Four million college students took at least one online class during the fall of 2007. But, over the past few months, something has changed. The elite, pace-setting universities have embraced the Internet. Not long ago, online courses were interesting experiments. Now online activity is at the core of how these schools envision their futures. This week, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology committed $60 million to offer free online courses from both universities. Two Stanford professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, have formed a company, Coursera, which offers interactive courses in the humanities, social sciences, mathematics and engineering. Their partners include Stanford, Michigan, Penn and Princeton. Many other elite universities, including Yale and Carnegie Mellon, are moving aggressively online. President John Hennessy of Stanford summed up the emerging view in an article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, "There's a tsunami coming." What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web. Many of us view the coming change with trepidation. Will online learning diminish the face-to-face community that is the heart of the college experience? Will it elevate functional courses in business and marginalize subjects that are harder to digest in an online format, like philosophy? Will fast online browsing replace deep reading? If a few star professors can lecture to millions, what happens to the rest of the faculty? Will academic standards be as rigorous? What happens to the students who don't have enough intrinsic motivation to stay glued to their laptop hour after hour? How much communication is lost - gesture, mood, eye contact - when you are not actually in a room with a passionate teacher and students? The

"Pulling for Better E-Textbook Prices January 18, 2012 - 4:50am By Steve Kolowich In a session at the 2011 Educause conference in October, Bradley Wheeler, the chief information officer at Indiana University, issued a challenge to his colleagues. Unless universities assert their power as customers, the vendors that sell them products and services will continue squeezing those institutions for cash while dictating the terms under which they go digital. That conversation revolved around expensive, institution-level investments such as learning-management platforms and enterprise resource planning software. Now Wheeler and his colleagues are looking to apply the same principles of "aggregated demand" to help students save money on electronic textbooks. Internet2, a consortium of 221 colleges and universities, which last year brokered landmark deals with Box.com and Hewlett-Packard that gave its members discounts on cloud computing services, announced today that it had entered into a contract with McGraw-Hill, a major textbook publisher, aimed at creating similar discounts for students on digital course materials. Students have less ability than universities to pool their power as consumers, says Wheeler. The ascendance of e-textbooks means, among other things, that the secondary market for used books -- the one area where students can exercise power over textbook pricing -- could soon disappear. Universities would do well by their students to exercise leverage on their students' behalf, Wheeler says. "If somebody [does not] speak up for students in the move from print to digital, the students [are] going to get killed," he says. Beginning this month, five major universities - the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, the University of Virginia, Cornell University, and the University of California at Berkeley -- will start a pilot program in which certain courses will use only electronic texts. The texts will be a

"December 12, 2010 Student Learning: Measure or Perish By Kevin Carey For the past three months, The Chronicle's reporters have been writing a series of articles collectively titled Measuring Stick, describing the consequences of a higher-education system that refuses to consistently measure how much students learn. From maddening credit-transfer policies and barely regulated for-profit colleges to a widespread neglect of teaching, the articles show that without information about learning, many of the most intractable problems facing higher education today will go unsolved. Failing to fill the learning-information deficit will have many consequences: * The currency of exchange in higher education will continue to suffer from abrupt and unpredictable devaluation. Students trying to assemble course credits from multiple institutions into a single degree-that is, most students-frequently have their credits discounted for no good reason. That occurs not only when students transfer between the two- and four-year sectors, or when the institutions involved have divergent educational philosophies. A student trying to transfer credits from an introductory technical-math course at Bronx Community College to other colleges within the City University of New York system, for example, would be flatly denied by five institutions and given only elective credit by three others. John Jay College of Criminal Justice, by contrast, would award the student credit for an introductory modern-math course acceptable for transfer by every CUNY campus, including Bronx Community College-except that BCC would translate that course into trigonometry and college algebra, not technical math. Students who emerge from this bureaucratic labyrinth should be awarded credit in Kafka studies for their trouble. Credit devaluation, which wastes enormous amounts of time, money, and credentialed learning every year, is rooted in mistrust. Because colleges don't know what students in

"Technology Is at Least 3 Years Away From Improving Student Success January 13, 2012, 7:34 am By Josh Fischman Las Vegas-At the very start of the Higher Ed Tech Summit here this week, James Applegate threw out a challenge. Mr. Applegate, vice president for program development at the Lumina Foundation, told an overflow crowd that the United States needed 60 percent of its adults to hold high-quality degrees and credentials by the year 2025. During the rest of the day, technology executives described programs that could improve graduation rates and learning, but won't be able to do so for several years. They collect many points of data on what professors and students do, but can't yet say what results in better grades and graduation rates. "We're beginning to get lots of data on things like time of task, but we don't have the outcomes yet to say what leads to a true learning moment. I think we are three to five years away from being about to do that," said Troy Williams, vice president and general manager of Macmillan New Ventures, which makes the classroom polling system called I-clicker. "These are really early days," agreed Matthew Pittinsky, who runs a digital transcript company called Parchment and was one of the founders of Blackboard. There's lots of technology out there that's outcome-related. For instance, at the meeting, which is part of the international Consumer Electronics Show, the interactive textbook publisher Kno announced a suite of new features. One of them, a performance gauge callled Kno Me, gives students information about how much time they spend on different sections of a book, the results of quizzes, and the kinds of notes they took. "With thousands of students using these books, we can show them which of these variables are related to students-anonymous, of course-who get A's, or B's, or C's, so students learn what kind of activity leads to the best results," said Osman Rashid, the company's chief ex

"Tue, Jan. 31, 2012, 3:01 AM Global contest will lead to help during heart attacks By Marie McCullough Inquirer Staff Writer SEPTA station manager Garry Deans saved a man´s life this month because he knew the location of an AED. MICHAEL S. WIRTZ / Staff Photographer SEPTA station manager Garry Deans saved a man's life this month because he knew the location of an AED. Do you know where the nearest defibrillator is located? Yes No View results Post a comment RELATED STORIES Join the MyHeartMap challenge PHILLY.COM's TOP FIVE PICKS Mayor Nutter outraged at suspect's bail Media misled about whereabouts of Santorum daughter Parents: Disabled daughter's transplant could happen Where's the school choice, Chaput? Contest's 1st clue: Find the pig Around the world, the hunt is on for thousands of lifesaving portable medical devices that are hanging in public places - in Philadelphia. Why would someone in, say, Abu Dhabi care about finding devices in Philadelphia? Because a University of Pennsylvania project to map the locations of automated external defibrillators (AEDs) throughout the city has mushroomed into a global "crowdsourcing" competition fueled by the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, smartphones - and the chance to win cash prizes up to $10,000. The ultimate prize, of course, will be saving the lives of cardiac-arrest victims. Penn plans to create an interactive online AED registry that will, for the first time, enable the city's 911 system, emergency responders - and any bystander with a phone - to quickly locate an AED. Beginning Tuesday, participants in Philadelphia will use a free app downloaded to their phones to transmit photos and locations of the city's estimated 5,000 AEDs. These backpack-size machines can assess a cardiac-arrest victim and, if appropriate, deliver an electric shock to restart the heart. Studies show even sixth graders can follow an AED's step-by-step audio directions. But in this age of cyber collaboration, the contest, called "

"Big Data's Arrival February 1, 2012 - 3:00am By Paul Fain New students are more likely to drop out of online colleges if they take full courseloads than if they enroll part time, according to findings from a research project that is challenging conventional wisdom about student success. But perhaps more important than that potentially game-changing nugget, researchers said, is how the project has chipped away at skepticism in higher education about the power of "big data." Researchers have created a database that measures 33 variables for the online coursework of 640,000 students - a whopping 3 million course-level records. While the work is far from complete, the variables help track student performance and retention across a broad range of demographic factors. The data can show what works at a specific type of institution, and what doesn't. That sort of predictive analytics has long been embraced by corporations, but not so much by the academy. The ongoing data-mining effort, which was kicked off last year with a $1 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is being led by WCET, the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies. Project Participants American Public University System Community College System of Colorado Rio Salado College University of Hawaii System University of Illinois-Springfield University of Phoenix A broad range of institutions (see factbox) are participating. Six major for-profits, research universities and community colleges -- the sort of group that doesn't always play nice -- are sharing the vault of information and tips on how to put the data to work. "Having the University of Phoenix and American Public University, it's huge," said Dan Huston, coordinator of strategic systems at Rio Salado College, a participant. According to early findings from the research, at-risk students do better if they ease into online education with a small number of courses, which flies in the face of widely-he

"July 1, 2011 As Costs of New Rule Are Felt, Colleges Rethink Online Course Offerings in Other States By Kelly Field Bismarck State College, a two-year institution located in the capital of North Dakota, offers something few colleges do: online degrees in power-plant technology. Utilities across the country send workers to the community college for specialized training in electric power, nuclear power, and other fields. "We're pretty darn unique," said Larry C. Skogen, the college's president. "I don't think we have any competition out there." Though other colleges offer similar programs on campus, "we deliver nationwide online," he said, with students in all 50 states. That could change soon. Under federal rules that take effect on July 1, Bismarck State will have to seek approval to operate in every state where it enrolls students, or forgo those students' federal aid. With some states charging thousands of dollars per application, the college is weighing whether it can afford to remain in states where the cost of doing business outweighs the benefits, in tuition terms. Though the college hasn't made any decisions yet, "the reality is that if we run into a state where we have few students and it's expensive [to get approval], it's probably not going to be cost-effective to continue," Mr. Skogen said. Such cost-benefit calculations are being conducted on campuses across the country, as college leaders struggle to make sense of a patchwork of state rules that were written in an era when "college" was synonymous with "campus" and online learning was in its infancy. Gregory Ferenbach, a lawyer who advises colleges on regulatory compliance, said he has heard from a "couple dozen" colleges, most of them nonprofits, that are considering withdrawing from some states because of the cost or burden of obtaining approval. Their decisions could have a significant effect on college access. If enough colleges steer clear of states with expensive approval processes, or s

"To address these changes, the Council of Australian University Directors of Information Technology (CAUDIT, http://www.caudit.edu.au/), the U.S.-based EDUCAUSE (http://www.educause.edu/), the United Kingdom's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/), and the Netherlands' SURFfoundation (http://www.surffoundation.nl/en/) undertook a collaborative visioning of the future of higher education. Although information technology is the focus of all four of these associations, the resulting white paper (from which this article is drawn) explores higher education overall, not just information technology.2 The value of information technology lies in the activities it supports, which span virtually every college and university system for managing finances, learning, research, security, sustainability, and more. IT professionals thus need to understand the larger issues faced by their institutions: the drivers of change and the enablers, themes, and questions for the future."

Press Release from the Wikimedia Foundation Wikimedia Foundation will engage academic experts and students to improve public policy information on Wikipedia $1.2 million grant from the Stanton Foundation to support first initiative of its kind for Wikipedia SAN FRANCISCO May 11, 2010 -- The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia, today announced a new project designed to improve the quality of public policy-related articles on Wikipedia. It is the first time the Wikimedia Foundation has launched a project designed to systematically increase the quality of articles in a particular topic area. The project will be funded via a $1.2 million grant from the US-based Stanton Foundation, a long-time funding partner of the Wikimedia Foundation. The Stanton Foundation is the beneficiary foundation created in the name of the US broadcasting industry leader and media innovator, Frank Stanton. Dr. Stanton's commitment to civic education and freedom of speech carries on through his philanthropic legacy, the Stanton Foundation. "Wikipedia is a key informational resource for hundreds of millions of people," said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. "The Stanton Foundation wants to increase people's understanding of public policy-related issues, and supporting quality on Wikipedia is a great way to accomplish that goal. Meanwhile, the Wikimedia Foundation is keen to experiment with techniques for encouraging subject-matter experts to work alongside our volunteers to improve quality. This funding will enable us to do that, and I am --as always-- very grateful to the Stanton Foundation for its support." Wikipedia is written by hundreds of thousands of volunteers from around the world, and that won't change with this project. The Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative will recruit Wikipedia volunteers to work with public policy professors and students to identify topic areas for improvement, and work to make them better. Some of tha

March 18, 2012 A Boom Time for Education Start-Ups Despite recession investors see technology companies' 'Internet moment' By Nick DeSantis Harsh economic realities mean trouble for college leaders. But where administrators perceive an impending crisis, investors increasingly see opportunity. In recent years, venture capitalists have poured millions into education-technology start-ups, trying to cash in on a market they see as ripe for a digital makeover. And lately, those wagers have been getting bigger. Investments in education-technology companies nationwide tripled in the last decade, shooting up to $429-million in 2011 from $146-million in 2002, according to the Na­tional Venture Capital Association. The boom really took off in 2009, when venture capitalists pushed $150-million more into education-technology firms than they did in the previous year, even as the economy sank into recession. "The investing community believes that the Internet is hitting edu­cation, that education is having its Internet moment," said Jose Ferreira, founder of the interactive-learning company Knewton. Last year Mr. Ferreira's company scored a $33-million investment of its own in one of the biggest deals of the year. Enlarge Image A Boom Time for Education Start-Ups 2 Mark Abramson for The Chronicle Huge advances in computing power at colleges have created a fertile ground for companies offering technology services, like the computer-learning group Knewton (above), where staff members recently gathered for a meeting. The scramble to make bets on a tech-infused college revolution has led to so many new companies that even Mr. Ferreira can't keep track. Udacity, Udemy, and University­Now all have plans to revolutionize online learning. There's the Coursebook, a young online-learning start-up. And Coursekit, a nascent challenger to Blackboard in the market for learning-management software. And Courseload, the Indiana-based digital-textbook enterprise. And CourseRank, the cl

"MITx: The Next Chapter for University Credentialing? December 19, 2011 - 3:36pm By Audrey Watters A big announcement from MIT today: the university is launching a new online learning initiative, MITx, one that will allow non-enrolled students to take online courses and receive certification if they successfully complete them. MIT has long been known for being on the leading edge of higher education experimentation, most notably with MIT OpenCourseware. The decision by MIT faculty to make all of their course materials freely and openly available online is now a decade old, and some 100 million people have downloaded and accessed that content. But even with a catalog that boasts over 2,000 courses, MIT OCW has always been just that: courseware. All the syllabi, handouts, and quizzes, but no interaction with professors, no interaction with fellow learners, no grades, no college credit. MITx will act as a middle tier, of sorts, something between the traditional, on-campus experience of formally enrolled MIT students and the open and informal learning opportunities afforded by open courseware. But "this is not MIT light," insists Provost L. Rafael Reif. What MITx is is still very much under construction. The first class should be available in the spring of 2012, and it's not clear what course(s) will be offered (although it's a probably a safe bet that it's a science or engineering class). MIT describes MITx as a self-paced course, one with "interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication." While the course itself will be free (and the custom-created course materials will be openly licensed, as with all MIT courses), students who wish to be graded will be able to pay for certification. There's no indication yet of what that fee will be. Nor is it clear how assessment for MITx will work -- will all students take quizzes and submit homework or just those who are paying for certification? Will students have access to instructors? If so, how?

"January 22, 2012 MIT Mints a Valuable New Form of Academic Currency James Yang for The Chronicle By Kevin Carey The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has invented or improved many world-changing things-radar, information theory, and synthetic self-replicating molecules, to name a few. Last month the university announced, to mild fanfare, an invention that could be similarly transformative, this time for higher education itself. It's called MITx. In that small lowercase letter, a great deal is contained. MITx is the next big step in the open-educational-resources movement that MIT helped start in 2001, when it began putting its course lecture notes, videos, and exams online, where anyone in the world could use them at no cost. The project exceeded all expectations-more than 100 million unique visitors have accessed the courses so far. Meanwhile, the university experimented with using online tools to help improve the learning experience for its own students in Cambridge, Mass. Now MIT has decided to put the two together-free content and sophisticated online pedagogy­-and add a third, crucial ingredient: credentials. Beginning this spring, students will be able to take free, online courses offered through the MITx initiative. If they prove they've learned the materi­al, MITx will, for a small fee, give them a credential certifying as much. In doing this, MIT has cracked one of the fundamental problems retarding the growth of free online higher education as a force for human progress. The Internet is a very different environment than the traditional on-campus classroom. Students and employers are rightly wary of the quality of online courses. And even if the courses are great, they have limited value without some kind of credential to back them up. It's not enough to learn something-you have to be able to prove to other people that you've learned it. The best way to solve that problem is for a world-famous university with an unimpeachable reputat

"What Does It Mean To Be an Academic? January 6, 2012, 4:21 pm By Nigel Thrift There is a fascinating moment when academics reflect upon their practices in ways that are not just emblematic but are clearly leading to real change in what the practice of being an academic actually means. I have been reminded of this fact twice recently as I have considered practices of teaching and research at a number of universities around the world. First, in the case of teaching, there was seeing some of the new educational technology which is coming into operation. I am not just talking about remarkable educational sites like the interactive simulation site for the physical sciences, PhET, which is used by so many science professors. As good as these undoubtedly can be at allowing students to reach a level of competence in particular problems before they come near a lecture, there is also the new software which allows real interaction in the classroom and the tracking of the reaction to that interaction in order to enable new rounds of inquiry. The consequences are only just being worked through but in time, I am now pretty sure, the lecture in its old form, understood as a direct oral presentation intended to present information or to teach students about a particular subject and delivered by a lecturer standing at the front of the room and giving out information and judgments, will become a minority teaching method. Instead, what were lectures will be recorded for students to consult-many universities have already produced a library of such presentations-and the time previously put by for lectures will be used as a surgery, as a time for problem-solving, clarification, and the like. This is a no less time-consuming method of teaching-indeed, it may involve more work. But I think it is likely to become the norm in many disciplines. Second, in the case of research, there has been reading Paul Rabinow's latest book, The Accompaniment, which includes a fascinating cha

"Publishing, Education and "How A Book Is Born" January 9, 2012 - 8:30pm By Joshua Kim If you work in higher ed, you fall asleep every night asking yourself the following questions: Will we suffer the same fate as the record industry, the bookstores and the newspaper business? Is higher ed another example of a physical, as opposed to a digital, information industry - and therefore ripe for disruption? If the core business model of education is built on scarcity, will we survive this transition to information abundance? I imagine that these questions also haunt the dreams of people who work in publishing? All these questions, and more, make reading How a Book is Born: The Making of The Art of Fielding a worthwhile investment of our time. The barriers to reading this book are actually amazingly low. This Kindle Single is only $1.99. At 62 pages, it will not take much time. And if you have read Harbach's The Art of Fielding (a terrific campus novel), then description this backstory is probably irresistible. One thing we learn from How A Book Is Born is that publishing is very big business: "……total book sales in the United States last year were $13.9 billion - and twice that if you include textbooks and other educational materials. Random House, the biggest of the so-called Big Six publishers, brings in about $2.5 billion a year in revenue; Hachette Book Group, at the smaller end of the Big Six, brings in about $700 million. Michael Pietsch's Little, Brown, which sold 21 million books in 2010, accounted for more than a quarter of that. The vast majority of publishers' revenue (100 percent, in the case of Little, Brown) is from the sale of books and subsidiary rights to books; for the moment, publishers really have no other way to make money." The question is, will e-books change not only how books are read, but how they are published? Traditionally, one of the major roles of the publisher has been to place books in bookstores. Will

"February 2, 2012 Multiyear Study of Community-College Practices Asks: What Helps Students Graduate? By Jennifer Gonzalez Community colleges are brimming with programs and policies designed to help students complete their studies. Practices like requiring orientation and establishing early-academic-warning systems have sprouted since 2009, when President Obama announced that he wanted to make the United States the best-educated country in the world by 2020. Now the questions for the nation's community colleges are: Which of the practices work and why? And perhaps most important, how do colleges expand them to cover all students? A new, multiyear project led by the Center for Community College Student Engagement will attempt to get some answers. The research organization plans to analyze data from four different but related surveys and produce reports annually for the next three years. The surveys represent responses from the perspective of entering and experienced students, faculty members, and institutions. Kay M. McClenney, the center's director and a senior lecturer in the Community College Leadership Program at the University of Texas at Austin, says the project will allow community colleges to make more-informed decisions about how they spend money and about the type of policies and programs they want to emphasize. The first of three reports, "A Matter of Degrees: Promising Practices for Community College Student Success" was released last week. It draws attention to 13 strategies for increasing retention and graduation rates, including fast-tracking remedial education, providing students with experiential learning, and requiring students to attend orientation. The strategies specified in the report are not new. In fact, many of them can be found at two-year colleges right now. But how well those strategies are working to help students stay in college and graduate is another matter. The report found peculiarities among responses on similar topics, sugges