In the Summer 2008 issue of Innovations, Henry Kelly, President of the Federation of American Scientists published an article titled “Continuous Improvement in Undergraduate Education: A Possible Dream” in which he argued that a variety of factors, among them growing global demand for higher education and the availability of new technologies for the delivery of…
Category: Posts
Productivity in Higher Education
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the issue of productivity in higher education. There are many ways to measure what we accomplish such as numbers of graduates, what kinds of jobs our graduates get, research dollars, patents received, research productivity (publishing), just to name some of the most obvious. But any discussion of such…
Almost Approved
So, after 1 year, 3 months, and 13 days, the General Education Committee acted on the proposal I submitted on behalf of our department for a new course called The Digital Past. And, of course, the course was not approved. Their reasoning works like this…After I submitted the proposal, the Committee decided to rewrite the…
Was the Last American Pirate ‘Authentic’?
Readers of this blog know the story of Edward Owens–the “Last American Pirate“–fairly well by now. Owens, a creation of my students in the course Lying About the Past, lives on, but in the way of all things in the academic world, I have managed to morph him from a fun classroom project into a…