Academics Make Case to End Credit Hour

Once adopted, the credit hour became a driving force in higher education. | It presented students with a specific time frame in which they were expected to complete course work, usually one semester…. But Wellman and Ehrlich, a senior scholar with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, argue in their book that using…

Please — Never Do This!

Please — Never Do This!E-Mail) This message, with the uninformative subject line “November Hours,” an empty body, and a 45K MS-Windows attachment (see tips #1, #2 and #3 of “Writing Effective E-Mail: Top 10 Tips“) went out to about 450 people By my count, this single message consumed 20MB of storage space on computers across…

No Personal Touch

I know this is probably a very uncool and politically incorrect thing to say these days, but I am going to brave it anyway. | I have wondered why, with all the briliant people writing in the different group blogs, am I not toally enchanted with them? —Torill —No Personal Touch (Thinking with My Fingers) The…

Butterfly

The butterfly effect has, until now, been cited only as an illustration, but Professor Jim Spanners of the Pennsylvania Institute for Making Stuff Up takes it seriously, and believes that butterflies are directly responsible for most of the world’s major problems. —Butterfly (The University of the Bleeding Obvious)

Children and Electronic Media

Recent years have seen an explosion in electronic media marketed directly at the very youngest children in our society, yet very little is known about how these changes have played out in young people’s lives. In order to help understand the implications, the Foundation conducted a national study of more than 1,000 parents of children…

Generic Candy Corn will Give You AIDS

Once again, Halloween season is upon us, and with it, the wonderful anticipation of dressing up and trick-or-treating for delicious Brach’s candy. With that in mind, it’s important to remember all the ways that you can make your Halloween safer and more fun. It won’t put a damper on anyone’s holiday spirits to wear high-visibility…

Big Companies Add to Spam

The problem of spam or unwanted commercial e-mail is usually attributed to outlaws and hucksters — peddlers of pornography, get-rich-quick schemes and pills of dubious merit — who use hackers to send their fraudulent messages in ways that cannot be traced. | But the torrent of spam that is flowing into people’s electronic mailboxes comes…

The Trouble with MMORPGs

It begins to creep in, almost unnoticed. The levels are further apart. You begin to notice that newly acquired skills are carbon copies of the old ones, with a different coloured icon and a two percent damage increase…. You try out all the little distractions the developers have put in the game to make things…

College and the Fall

Why do so many graduate programs teach students to hate what made so many of us want to become teachers and scholars when we were undergraduates: reading literature — old and new, from every culture — as if it was more than symptomatic of deplorable cultural pathologies? —Thomas H. Benton —College and the Fall (Chronicle) I…

Maestro's moonshine found

Workers remodeling a 19th-century rehearsal hall at the Peabody Institute have found 10 dusty jugs of moonshine in an unlocked closet, where they apparently sat for nearly 60 years. Faded labels on the bottles suggest that the hooch was the handiwork of Gustav Strube, the first conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. —Heather Dewar —Maestro’s…