Today is Commencement at my institution, and so I’ve gathered posts and a video that might fall under the category of “life advice” (considered broadly). Hopefully these will prove engaging for those just graduating and those long graduated who are sending them off.

• In the New York Times, Chronicle editor Jeffrey J. Selingo wonders whether it much matters what students choose for their majors. His conclusion? Not as much as the experiences they choose within their chosen field.

  These are many of the same qualities that employers say, in survey after survey, they want in future workers. Hiring managers complain that they often find today’s college graduates lacking in interpersonal skills, problem solving, effective written and oral communication skills, the ability to work in teams, and critical and analytical thinking. Employers say that future workplaces need degree holders who …

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Somehow it never ceases to amaze me how little people understand higher education, or have registered the pernicious effects of the shift away from full-time, tenure-track faculty over the past three decades. So, for example, here is Kevin Drum, who is a perfectly reasonable person, arguing that while computers might not be as good as readers at an Ivy League school, that’s not a reasonable comparison:

But the vast majority of grading isn’t done by top notch readers given plenty of time. It’s done by harried, mediocre readers. Can machines do as well or better than they do? Probably.

Harried, I’ll grant. The overreliance on adjuncts makes harried more or less par for the course.

But this notion that there is a wide gap–especially when it comes to teaching–between prestigious schools and more downmarket institutions makes me crazy, not least because it plays into higher…

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You know what? It’s finally spring break on my campus, so I will dispense with the ordinary top-of-the-post pleasantries and disappear into the mad frenzy of catching up on All. The. Things. blissful idylls of the break. (Though, apropos of that little joke, I like to be mindful of Natalie Houston’s post, “How was your winter break?”)

• Gardner Campbell reflects on how we might trust students to craft internet identities that are “personal, not private”: if we truly desire to protect our learners from themselves, we are failing. They are publishing to the Internet no matter what we say. Human beings typically want to connect with other human beings. Those energies will find an outlet. And my argument here is that we should not be protecting our learners from themselves. We should be trusting them, and aiding them in discovering and using (and teaching us, too) the arts of freedom.

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It’s such an ugly word: MOOC. It’s an acronym for “massive open online course,” something you probably already know if you’ve been paying attention to the latest news about higher education. MOOCs have been all over the news in the last few weeks, in part because the 2013 meeting of SxSWedu took place last week, where these new course delivery platforms were talked up a great deal. The Chronicle has even put together an online resource titled “What You Need to Know About MOOCs.”

Now, The Chronicle sent me to SxSWedu this year, and I’ll have some posts about the experience next week, but I can report for now that one of the big stories is data. Big data. About students and every last detail of their performance in schools. Former Microsoft head Bill Gates gave the closing keynote, in which he argued for the importance of gathering more data and making it easier to share across various …

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While it’s often the case that I’ll read an article in Victorian Studies or Nineteenth-Century Literature and think, *man*, I wish I wrote that, I don’t often have disciplinary envy. Until, that is, I learned about Philippe Charlier, et al.’s recent British Medical Journal article on “Toilet Hygiene in the Classical Era.” As glossed by Steve Mirsky, the article surveys wiping methods from antiquity, from snow to seashells to rocks, which yields a most excellent saying: “Three stones are enough to wipe.” Practical knowledge!

(I’ll grant that it’s a weird article, but it’s been a weird week.)

On to this week’s links!

• I almost always agree with Audrey Watters about most things, and her recent takedown of education-themed TED talks is no exception: And let’s be clear here: this is a calculated view and one perfectly crafted for the intellectually impeccable TED stage, on…

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