SLOW KNOWLEDGE
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Today at my university, the Scholar’s Lab held a talk on Open Access with Madelyn Wessel, Associate General Counsel and Dr. Brian Pusser, Curry School of Education. The talk was in celebration of Open Access Week (Oct 18-24), and served as a follow up conversation to the open access resolution passed by our Faculty Senate.…
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There have been several articles relating the latest cognitive and neurological investigations into how multitasking affects the brain, from the NYT article to PBS’ Frontline special Digital Nation. As studies (as yet largely speculative) are translated into lay terms, we are told that multitasking is the message of interactive media – that the logic of…
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I teach a seminar called Media, Culture and Society where we focus on issues of interactive digital media, or “new media.” In a discussion about Dhiraj Murthy’s article on new media and ethnographic research methods, my students raised concerns about how they, as young people, are expected to know how to use digital media tools…
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The Coalition on the Academic Workforce is an organization that seeks to understand and address problems related to contingent labor in higher education. They are currently conducting a survey that will provide better, more nuanced data on working conditions and benefits. As the AAUP newsletter describes: Most of the data on the working conditions of…
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Today’s Congressional hearing on for-profit educational institutions is raising questions of finance, accountability, and technology. The most unethical for-profits, who Sen. Franken has dubbed “bad actors,” show us the worst-case scenario of our times. The bad actors have capitalized on trends of joblessness, educational expansion, on-line learning, and easy access to student loans. A lack…
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This is a re-post from a blog I keep with my mom about family genealogy called social genealogy. It’s a historical look at the problem of education in a changing economy. — Willis Blaisdell was my great-grandfather. Before he passed when I was 5, he left me a number of neat and thoughtful tokens of…
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This week at Prof Hacker, Billie Hara suggests that service learning is not just for students. Service can also enrich the life of faculty. Specifically, service can help faculty break out of the ivory tower, teach us new things about “industry, community, populations, or activism,” and help us create work-life balance. In addition, I would…
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I had this idea that I wanted to do something to organize adjuncts, but I didn’t know what else or who else was out there. Today I stumbled through a web of blogs that have given careful consideration to issues ranging from gender inequality, to the class war between part time and full time faculty,…
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Higheredjobs.com recently posted an interview with Cathee Johnson Phillips of the National Postdoctoral Association (NPA) about the current state of post-doctoral researchers. Postdoctoral positions have been increasing since the 1970s (though Phillips predicts a dip in 2011 due to the recession) and post-docs have struggled to gain recognition as a class of workers. Post-doc positions…
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Limitless opportunity creates incapacitating uncertainty. The academic job market has bottomed out due to the Great Recession, but it has been faltering for years as universities, like other industries, turn toward part-time contract workers. Recent PhDs, primed for a lifetime of learning and knowledge production within the institution of academia, have diminishing opportunities to put…
jacob alden sargent 