Image: White Back Duck. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Good morning. Here are your links …
- Bilal Sarwary at the BBC gives us a glimpse of Helmand province that is rarely seen. Â He writes, “This type of checkpost is the real front line. There are poppy fields on one side, police headquarters on the other and constant fights with the Taliban.” Â So much for Operation Khanjar having made any impact at all…
- Arshia Sattar at the WSJ defends Wendy Doniger against Penguin’s capitulation to censorship demands in India.
- Ajai Shukla at Broadsword Blog tells us that China is articulating its own vision of the Indo-Pacific, “the Maritime Silk-Route.” Â The MSR idea is currently about as robust as America’s “Pivot.” But who knows what the future holds…
- John Keay, who wrote The Honourable Company, argues for more regional approaches to South Asia’s history.
- Jason Hickel helps to explain why the West is so corrupt. Â It is about time someone argued this point…
- Nick Danforth explains how the North ended up on top of the map.
- Pamela Barnett at Inside Higher Ed argues that we should scramble not flip the classroom.  As someone who emphasizes close reading of texts and who teaches at a small liberal arts college, I am struggling to understand this debate.  Who exactly are these professors with classes small enough to be flipped or scrambled that ever thought it was wise from a pedagogical perspective to lecture straight for every class session?
- Rachel Feltman argues that the gold medal in this year’s Olympics goes to the quantified self.
Who exactly are these professors with classes small enough to be flipped or scrambled that ever thought it was wise from a pedagogical perspective to lecture straight for every class session?
I haven’t read the Barnett piece but ISTM from other things I’ve read that the flipped-classroom is usually done with *large* or fairly large classes. Why wd you ‘flip’ the class if it’s a seminar-style setting? The whole pt, as I understand it, is not to lecture to 45 or 100 or 400 students but have them watch the lectures at home and do other things in class. If you’re not teaching 45 or 400 students, you don’t have the problem of lecturing too much, so you don’t need to flip the classroom. You have your 10 or 15 or 18 students in the class and there’s no issue. But not all profs are in that situation, obvs.
Okay, that makes more sense… but I really can’t imagine “flipping” a class with >100 students. Sounds like a formula for anarchy….
Okay, Jason Hickel is crazy. He says “The question is all the more baffling given that the City is immune from many of the nation’s democratic laws and free of all parliamentary oversight.”
This is just factually wrong. The guy knows nothing about what he’s talking about.