Inside Higher Ed: September 7, 2012

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News (View all) Retirement, Unions and Status: a Survey of Campus HR Officers Inside Higher Ed's first-ever study of chief HR officers finds underwhelming concern about retirement issues, skepticism about the role of unions -- and a desire for a stronger strategic role for themselves on campuses. Pell Spending Levels Off Federal spending on the biggest student grant program surprisingly declines by $2.2 billion, even as numbers of recipients increased. But a sword still hangs over the program. MOOCing On Site A second major MOOC provider signs deal to hold exams at physical testing centers, potentially elevating the credibility of certificates. Lost in the Storm Some political science departments scramble to do Skype or phone interviews after cancellation of the American Political Science Association conference. British Universities Embrace Marketing With more of an emphasis on tuition revenue, institutions focus on ways to attract students. Want to advertise here? Advertisement Quick Takes (View all) » Obama Sets Goal of Slowing Tuition Hikes » GOP Congressman Suggests Student Loans Unconstitutional » Report Faults Santa Monica College for Using Pepper Spray » Grandparents as Source of College Funds » Academic Minute: Ancient Dogs Advertisement Advertisement Views (View all) What Our Work Is Laurence Musgrove describes the complicated and ultimately rewarding nature of teaching. Advertisement Career Advice (View all) The Missing Element in Student Success For all the attention paid these days to retention and graduation, we pay so little to how teaching practices in the classroom can help nontraditional students. In the first of two essays, Mike Rose offers some guidance. Blog U (View all) Crafting an Engaging Lecture GradHacker As we prepare for a new school year, many of us will write lectures either by choice or because we feel or are told we must. I confess that I don’t like to lecture; I much prefer to facilitate student discussion, which places the responsibility for learning back on the students themselves. We have all experienced mind-numbing lectures and (most of us!) have vowed not to do that to our own students, but how do we break out of the mold in which we have been shaped? The Plagiarism Perplex Library Babel Fish There is an extraordinary tension in our culture between individual creativity and the creative community, between originality and a shared body of knowledge, between the acts of reading culture and writing culture. And our students are caught in the middle. Friday Fragments Confessions of a Community College Dean This year, for the first time, we made new student orientation mandatory. By “mandatory,” I mean that a new student who doesn’t attend any of the orientation sessions would get his schedule dropped.  (Obviously, we had to run a whole bunch of sessions on different days and times, so we did.) People on campus keep commenting on how unusually smooth the first few days of class have been. Kindle Fire HD: Movies, Games, Books, Exchange, Skype - But No Courses? Technology and Learning I get it. I really do. Amazon is not interested in adding education to the verticals that it wants to reinvent. Math Geek Mom: Perspective Mama PhD One topic I really enjoyed in my high school art class was perspective, the artistic technique used to create the illusion of depth in a picture. This is a concept that is also studied in Geometry, and it is a concept that I found myself thinking of this past week as I laughed at the fact that my daughter seems to be at a point in her life where she thinks that the world revolves around her. This perspecticve is at least partially caused by the nurturing neighborhood that we live in, where everyone’s child is important and neighbors are people to not only live next door to but to also socialize with us and support us as we live our lives on a set of a few streets way off the beaten path. Why that little table is so important Getting to Green Last week I wrote about a table of figures I find highly interesting, and earlier this week I found a way to publish the table itself. At first glance, the numbers bring into question the almost universally supposed efficiency of modern agricultural practices and -- especially for those of us with active imaginations -- perhaps the supposed efficiency of modern industrial methods in general. 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