April 23, 2013, 5:00 am
By Jeffrey R. Young
The Smithsonian Institution has signed a deal with Internet2 that could make it easier for colleges to connect with digital content in museums on the National Mall.
The new partnership, to be formally announced this morning at Internet2′s member meeting, will also bring high-speed Internet connections to some of the Smithsonian’s 19 museums and a technology-demonstration area in the institution’s Arts and Industry Building, which is currently being renovated. Internet2 is a nonprofit group that provides superfast network connections to some 220 college and university members.
Some individual colleges have already traded digital content with the Smithsonian. But the new partnership will make it easier for other colleges to do so as well without having to negotiate separate agreements with the cultural institution.
Shelton Waggener, senior vice president of Internet2, said in an…
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March 5, 2013, 3:20 pm
By Jennifer Howard
Daniel J. Cohen (Berkman Center for Internet & Society)
The long-planned Digital Public Library of America is set to make its public debut on schedule next month, with a two-day series of events, to be held April 18-19 at the Boston Public Library, and a new, high-profile leader at the helm. The DPLA announced on Tuesday that Daniel J. Cohen, a leading digital-humanities scholar, will be the project’s founding executive director.
Mr. Cohen comes to the project from George Mason University, where he directs the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. In the announcement, John Palfrey, president of the DPLA’s Board of Directors, praised Mr. Cohen’s contributions to libraries and digital scholarship.
“He has led major open-source development projects, helped to digitize important works of culture,…
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February 21, 2013, 4:28 pm
By Jake New
Low-cost online courses could allow a more-diverse group of students to try college, but a new study suggests that such courses could also widen achievement gaps among students in different demographic groups.
The study, which is described in a working paper titled “Adaptability to Online Learning: Differences Across Types of Students and Academic Subject Areas,” was conducted by Columbia University’s Community College Research Center. The researchers examined 500,000 courses taken by more than 40,000 community- and technical-college students in Washington State. They found that students in demographic groups whose members typically struggle in traditional classrooms are finding their troubles exacerbated in online courses.
The study found that all students who take more online courses, no matter the demographic, are less likely to attain a degree. However, some…
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January 28, 2013, 12:05 pm
By Jake New
With PowerPoint presentations, YouTube videos, and online portals, technology is playing an increasingly important role in college classrooms and lecture halls. But are those technologies improving learning?
A study published this month in the journal Science, Technology, & Human Values found that professors at research-intensive universities believe the answer to that question is no.
A report on the study, “Technological Change and Professional Control in the Professoriate,” includes interviews with more than 40 professors at three universities. It suggests that professors often use such technologies for logistical purposes rather than to improve learning.
“There is little or no indication that innovative pedagogy motivates technological use in the classroom, which sort of flies in the face of how the use of information-based instructional technologies is usually presented,…
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January 17, 2013, 9:01 pm
By Jake New
There was a time when professors, scholars, and even one of Wikipedia’s founders, Jimmy Wales, said the user-edited online encyclopedia should not be used in academe. But in recent years, academics seem to be looking more favorably on the popular reference tool.
The newest indication: The Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, is now the first presidential library in the United States to have a “Wikipedian in residence” on its staff.
Michael Barera, a master’s student in Michigan’s School of Information, has been selected for the new internship position and charged with increasing and enhancing the library’s presence on Wikipedia.
“Wikipedia is a completely new outreach venue for us,” Bettina Cousineau, exhibit specialist at the Ford Library and Museum, said in a news release. “Not everyone can visit our museum and library in person,…
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January 11, 2013, 2:58 pm
By Jennifer Howard
Members of the Modern Language Association don’t have to wait for their annual meeting to share scholarship and compare notes on the state of their profession. Now they can meet and greet virtually via a new social-media platform, MLA Commons.
The service, open to anyone who belongs to the association, made its official debut early this month. The site uses the open-source Commons in a Box WordPress plugin/toolkit, created at the City University of New York.
Users can upload information and links about themselves and their work, add fellow members to their list of contacts, create blog entries, and trade public or private messages. They can join or create groups devoted to different topics, including the digital humanities, so-called alternative-academic (or alt-ac) careers, “interdisciplinary approaches to culture and society,” media and literature, and community-focused “service …
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January 2, 2013, 2:27 pm
By Jeffrey R. Young
Articles about how free online courses, or MOOCs, could disrupt higher education dominated the headlines last year here at the Wired Campus blog, and they were the most popular with readers as well. Several articles about e-textbooks also topped our list of most-read articles of 2012, highlighting what has been a time of change, and anxiety, for colleges and universities.
Coursera and Udacity appear most frequently in this year’s top headlines. Both offer MOOCs, or massive open online courses, and both were founded by Stanford University computer-science professors who are now on leave. Together, they now claim more than two million students, though some of those sign up but never complete work in the courses.
The most popular episode of our monthly Tech Therapy podcast highlights another anxiety among college leaders—how much raw time all this personal technology use eats up….
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December 21, 2012, 4:55 am
By Marc Parry
During the New Deal of the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration hired writers to document history across the United States. The best-known effort collected oral histories of former slaves. Those interviews became the bedrock of research for decades, contributing to a reinterpretation of slavery that took place from the 1950s to the 1980s, says William G. Thomas III, a historian at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
Mr. Thomas sees something similar as possible today. He and others are trying to build a movement to gather “the people’s history.” And their project could spawn a new model for massive open online courses, or MOOC’s.
Since 2010, scholars and students at Nebraska and at James Madison University have organized a series of “History Harvests”—community events where families share their artifacts and stories with students, who document and digitize them. The idea…
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December 18, 2012, 2:18 pm
By Jeffrey R. Young
’Tis the season to reflect on the biggest trends in technology. Rather than looking back, though, we’re thinking about emerging leaders and the ideas they’re advocating.
In 2013 we plan to publish another list of top technology innovators in higher education, a follow-up to a popular feature we published last February. And again we need your help in finding the most interesting and influential people to profile.
You can find details on the nomination form below. Please share your suggestions and spread the word to colleagues.
Last year readers made more than 100 nominations, some of whom appeared on our list. Others ended up being featured in Chronicle articles later in the year. We also compiled the profiles, along with essays from each of the innovators, into an e-book, Rebooting the Academy.
Update: The deadline for submitting nominations was Friday, January 4, 2013,…
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November 28, 2012, 1:12 pm
By
The City University of New York’s Graduate Center has announced a project to expand the social-media reach of academics working on social-justice issues.
The project, called JustPublics@365 and supported by a $550,000 grant awarded this month by the Ford Foundation, seeks to “move conversations that happen within the ivory tower of academia into the wider world where they have broader impact,” said Jessie Daniels, a professor of public health and sociology and co-principal investigator for the grant.
The project will train professors and graduate students to use social media to make their social-justice research more visible to a wider audience and to measure its impact.
JustPublics@365 will hold a number of events, beginning in March, to connect researchers, social-justice activists, and journalists, including conferences on such topics as racial justice and the…
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