When I first started teaching intro to IR, I closed the semester with lectures on climate change and the second Congo war (or "Africa's world war"). This was part of my effort to include current and overlooked aspects of international relations. As time went on, and...
This is a co-authored post with Carrie Booth Walling, Associate Professor and Chair of Political Science at Albion College. She is the author of All Necessary Measures: the United Nations and...
Josh’s post on his experience with course evaluations has gotten me thinking about the practice of using course evaluations. Because my personal circumstances differ from Josh’s (e.g. I do not have...
Last year I wrote a post titled “So You Want to be a Liberal Arts Professor.” At the time, I promised a series of pieces on the subject, but then my job as a liberal arts college professor got in...
There's a Slate article titled "The End of the College Essay" circulating in various Facebook and Twitter circles critical of assigning long essays to undergraduates. The gist of the complaint mirrors the complaints I've heard over the years from students and colleagues (and others outside the academy) about assigning long research papers. Last summer, I attended a conference in Toronto on the future of liberal education in which a number of participants criticized the long-form research paper by noting that, unless students go into Ph.D programs, most will never write a long paper again in...
The first video ever played on MTV, back when MTV played music videos most of the time, was the one-hit wonder "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles. A lament about how new technology ended the career of a singer who was well-adapted to the production standards and genre constraints of an earlier era, the song recounts an irreversible process: In my mind and in my car We can't rewind we've gone too far Pictures came and broke your heart Put the blame on VTR Maybe this rings a faint bell for some of you. In any case, for a quick refresher, you can watch the whole thing here. The great...
Happy first day of Fall classes, at least at my university. A question for discussion: Is there any value whatsoever to a live lecture delivered in front of large numbers of students, given that podcasting is now sufficiently easy and ubiquitous that anyone with a laptop or a smartphone (or a digital voice recorder or camcorder) or access to those devices via a campus IT services department can do it? I would appreciate it if we could have this discussion without appealing to any mystical or metaphysical "connection" that mysteriously arises in a live lecture hall. What, if anything, is the...
Okay, I don't have one. But I'd like to call attention to some excellent discussion of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Adam Kotsko asks "what is the business model for online education." Nigel Thrift analyzes the recent "media obsession" with MOOCs. Louis Betty makes unfortunate swipes at Apple in pursuit of a larger point about techno-faddishism, pedagogy, and higher education. Betty's piece recalls a great satirical post that Paul Musgrave wrote some time ago at the Duck. And Thoreau reminds us that the real problem in higher education is the debt bubble. You should go read all of...
LATE UPDATE: PTJ blogs about undergrad education