According to this flyer, I’m going to be giving a talk next Friday at 2pm at Brandeis University, called “Faculty as Hackers, Higher Education as a Playground.” And, when I check my calendar, it’s true!
The talk, I’m told, is open to the public. If you’re in the Boston area next weekend (perhaps because you’re attending THATCamp NE, but maybe just because), why not stop by?
On to this week’s links:
- Last Friday, Kate Clancy wrote an amazing post about “the three things I learned at the Purdue Conference for Pre-Tenure Women: on being a radical scholar”: I’m not saying every academic needs to be interdisciplinary, or every academic needs a blog. But some of us are committed to thinking about scholarship in a different way, or being public intellectuals. We want to put time and effort into influencing our fields but also inspiring lay scientists and future academics. That is its own kind of professional impact.
- William Wandless has been a Friend of ProfHacker so long, he helped me move 3 times while in grad school. And now look at him, writing excellent advice about letters of recommendation for academic jobs: They are a stable genre like the CV (or at least they tend to be), normally involving two pages, two pro forma framing paragraphs, and three or four paragraphs of indicative filling, yet they also involve myriad variations on personal and professional themes.
- The image to Audrey Watters’s post about Pearson’s ‘free’ LMS, announced this week, tells you all you need to know about the idea: While, true, The New York Times recently challenged some of the claims of “revolutionary results” on educational software, I don’t see as vocal or widespread a questioning of educational marketing tactics like I do about the claims of food labels.
- Kathi Inman Berens describes a key pedagogical insight, cribbed from her cardiologist father-in-law: “Watch one, do one, teach one.”: Academic culture is built upon the premise that failure is shameful: a sign of imbecility, or slapdash preparation. That’s why the Lab’s “FAIL HARDER” sign shocks. We are being exhorted to override our training and instinct to shelter ideas that may not be fully articulated, or practices at which may not yet be masterful.
- I love this: the annotated source code of Metroid for the NES (via Kottke). You can see a Nintendo game come together!
In this week’s video, Adam Lisagor discusses the video as a user experience:
Have a great weekend!
Photo “Boston Common” by Flickr user SnurbCreative Commons licensed