Apr 10 2009
Friday night link round-up
I’m having a relatively quiet evening here watching some TV and surfing the ‘net, so I thought I’d post a few links of stuff I’ve come across:
- “The Furlough Blues: Or, How I spent my 12 days of university-ordered, unpaid leave”by Keith Miller from CHE about this situation at Arizona State University. I completely understand where Miller is coming from: I have no idea how I would handle this either, and I sure as heck hope it doesn’t come to EMU.
- Over at Writing for Ants, “Give the machines what they deserve” is about this recent Inside Higher Ed article about this dubious services by StraighterLine to teach first year comp for dirt-cheap. There was a lot of outrage about all this on WPA-L (including by me), and I think this is a good commentary as well. But interestingly enough, the same night I came across this…
- …“Accreditor Eyes Course Outsourcing,” which is another Inside Higher Ed article about StraighterLine. Here’s a quote:
“It turns out that students and faculty members aren’t the only ones seeking more information about an arrangement between Fort Hays State University and a company that sells online general education courses for $99 each. The arrangement was a surprise to Fort Hays’ accreditor, the North Central Association of College and Schools, which is now asking questions.
North Central is also examining the company’s relationship with two for-profit institutions it accredits: Ellis University and Grand Canyon University.
- “Ward Churchill Redux” is Stanley Fish’s response/summary/commentary on the resolution of the Churchill affair. We’ll see if this is the end of this deal or not.
- A couple of good posts about the decline of the newspaper business: “That Whining Sound You Hear Is The Death Wheeze Of Newspapers” from TechCrunch, “As Newspapers Implode, Diverse Voices Move Online” from MediaShift, and “The Speech the NAA Should Hear” from BuzzMachine by Jeff Jarvis. I have to say I kind of agree with these critiques.
- Best Online Collaboration Tools of 2009. This is kind of a weird one– you’ve got to scroll around the page to see stuff– but there are oodles of social networking/collaboration tools here, maybe some things to think about when I try to get students to make collaborative movies online again.
- Will Richardson interviewed Kathy Yancey– one of those things to come back to later.
I watched the first segment of the Yancey interview. It’s familiar ground in many respects (i.e., echoes her CCCC keynote and more recent work for NCTE), but it is useful in that it offers a concise overview of the sea change for writing over the past half-decade.
I was impressed, by the way, with Will Richardson’s production of the interview using uStream. The lighting on the videos is not all that great, but it neat to be able to toggle between video streams in a real-time conversation like they did. I look forward to messing around with uStream a bit more over the next few weeks.