The Man Behind Schoolhouse Rock!
A visit with Bob Dorough, 92, the man who set education to song for a generation in the US.
The Open Syllabus Project, Altmetrics, and a New Dataset
The Open Syllabus Project has created a database of over 1 million college syllabuses and extracted the names of the materials used in these courses. These materials are analyzed quantitatively and ranked. The creators of the service propose a new metric for the evaluation of academic publications.
NYPL Shows Academic Libraries What "Public Domain" Means
The New York Public Library has now opened up hundreds of thousands of their digitized public-domain documents to unrestricted access and reuse, encouraging members the general public to exercise all the rights in those documents that the law gives them. Why aren’t more academic libraries doing the same thing?
The Internet's Permanent Memory: Why Empathy is More Important Than Ever
Victoria Belmont talks about what happens when something you do online is taken out of context and becomes part of the internet’s permanent memory.
Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Our Story: Hamiltunes and the Burden of Founding Histories
The musical “Hamilton” raises questions about history and historical practice that reflects what scholars are and aren’t doing.
Speech is Instinctive, Writing is Hard
Steven Pinker discusses a better model for more effective prose, particularly for academic authors.
The Dissertation Mess: Balancing Rights and Responsibilities
The broad online availability of theses and dissertations creates difficult tensions between the individual rights of authors, the rights of educational institutions, and the responsibilities that both have to global scholarship and the collective good. How can we resolve those tensions?
Happy 100th Birthday to Relativity–More or Less, Depending on Where You're Reading This
Celebrating Einstein’s theory of General Relativity with a well-known time traveler.
MOOCs Rise from the Ashes
The MOOCs seem to have faded from view. In large part this is because they were so relentlessly overhyped when they first appeared. But now various forms of online education have begun to get traction in the marketplace. An essay by Clay Shirky points out how online education is operating today and its implications for higher education.
Ask The Chefs: How Does The Increased Use of Adjunct Faculty Affect Scholarly Publishing?
How does a differentiation between faculty on separate tracks for research or educational roles will drive change in the reward system? How might it impact scholarly publishing?
The Death of the Collection and the Necessity of Library-Publisher Collaboration: Young Librarians on the Future of Libraries
Applicants for a recent conference scholarship wrote essays that tended strongly to depict the traditional collection as dead and collaboration between librarians and publishers as essential to the library’s future. Do they herald a generational shift in mindset among librarians?
Notes on Publishing in an Emerging Economy
Well-intended government policy in an Eastern European nation is having unexpected results on school publishing, some of which are the precise opposite of what policymakers had hoped for. The problem is that those who draft policy have little imagination about how new programs will be taken up–and altered–in the marketplace.
The Impact of Color
A video showing how filmmakers use color to evoke an emotional response from an audience.
Back to School
John Oliver’s guide to the upcoming year for students.
ORCID Out of the Box
Charlie Rapple reports back from ISMTE, which does not stand for the International Society of Making Toys Educational