Tag Archives: social media

Biking 2,500 miles!

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This is an official challenge to anyone now writing in the Tour de France or, for that matter, any cyclist in the world who comes across this post. Yesterday, on 5 July 2010, at 4:19 PM, I left my house for a bike ride. I used an iPhone app called MapMyRide to–well–map my ride. My ride ended at 5:11 PM, making it a 50 minute ride. I thought that I had ridden about six or 7 miles, at a leisurely pace, stopping to take pictures here and there.

But I don’t know my own power! When I looked at the map of my route as uploaded, I had biked 2487.1 miles: across western Massachusetts, through upstate New York, through a little piece of Ontario on the Great Lakes, through Michigan, across Lake Michigan (there must be a ferry), through Wisconsin and Minnesota into Canada, across Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and well into Alberta just above Edmonton. I’ve embedded the map below, but it’s impressive to list them out like that, don’t you think?


I remember none of it, nor how I got home… I did get some pictures, but I stopped taking them a few miles from home. I’m not sure why. Did I fall asleep on Ambien during this 2400 mile ride? I don’t take Ambien! Anyway, here’s my six, not so interesting pictures.
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How I Become Captivated by Lena Horne

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Lena Horne, 92, an electrifying performer who shattered racial boundaries by changing the way Hollywood presented black women and who enjoyed a six-decade singing career on stage, television and in films, died Sunday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

Ms. Horne, considered one of the most beautiful women in the world, came to the attention of Hollywood in 1942. She was the first black woman to sign a meaningful long-term contract with a major studio, a contract that said she would never have to play a maid.  –via Adam Bernstein, The Washington Post.

Sesame Street, 1975

She leaves behind an amazing body of work.  No doubt you’ll hear “Stormy Weather” in a report on her career during the next few days, as it is probably her best known song.  If not, do yourself a favor and listen to it. When I think of Lena Horne, however, that song is the second thing that comes to mind.

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Higher Education, Technology, and the Job Market in Morocco… and the USA

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King Fahd School of Translation

I was in Morocco last week for two events relating to the the role of the university in preparing graduating students for the evolving job market in this country. The first was the annual April seminar at the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies. This year it focused on higher education and the job market and delved into some important issues. I found developments at Abdelmalek Essadi University particularly exciting because I have something of a relationship with that institution. I taught at the King Fahd School of Translation for 2 1/2 years which is a branch of the university, and because a close friends used to teach there.

The universities in Morocco have much more autonomy than they did when I was there, and it appears that the Abdelmalek Essadi, which has campuses in both Tetouan and Tangier, is one of the institutions that has taken greatest advantages of this.  It’s outgoing President, Mohammed Bennounna, has done much to transform the institution into one that is responsive to the rapidly changing economic and social realities of contemporary Morocco.  Representatives of the private sector at the seminar seemed quite impressed with what has been done, so it seems that the reform is, in fact, movement in the right direction.

Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane

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SAR ACADEMIC FREEDOM MEDIA REVIEW

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Academic Freedom Media Review
April 3 – 9, 2010
Compiled by Scholars at Risk

Tariq Ramadan Gets the American Debate He Says He Craved
Peter Schmidt, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4/9

UCSD prof turns meeting into protest rally
Eleanor Yang Su, The Union Tribune, 4/9
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Higher Education, Collaboration, and Education for the 21st Century

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TALIM

In a few days I am off to Morocco for a seminar at TALIM on higher education and employment in Morocco. But the job market in the United States is also very challenging of college graduates right now, and American educators may well be asking themselves if higher education in this country is adequately preparing students to enter the work force of the global era.

We still function in terms of national economies, but those economies are increasingly connected so that a crisis in one affects many others.  We also live in a world in which graduating students in America compete for employment, directly or indirectly, with their peers in Mexico, Morocco, India and Taiwan. And the whole lot of them are also competing with graduating students in Pakistan, Costa Rica, Tunisia, Israel and Poland. Continue reading →

“Internationalized Academe Is Inevitable,” but Will We Do it Well

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“The internationalization of higher education is inevitable,” Mr. Levine, a former president of Teachers College at Columbia University, said in a speech on Wednesday to the Association of International Education Administrators whose members are meeting here this week.

In internationalization, “some bold universities will lead,” Mr. Levine said. “Others will be populizers. And others will hold onto the past and will be destined to fail.”

via “Internationalized Academe Is Inevitable, but Its Form Is Not,” The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The quotation above is from a short version of a longer article the was published in the February 26 print edition of the Chronicle.  A recurring point of tension at that meeting, and one that is also clear from the comments on the report linked above, is that there is a tension between the need to internationalize curricula and the costs of doing so. Like so many sectors of the economy, higher education is experiencing significant financial challenges and this is the problem.

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Journalism and Online Discourse

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However, while blogs have created hundreds of prominent new voices in the national media, social networking sites like twitter have only reinforced the position of people and institutions who were already prominent in other media.  Not a single person has risen to become a prominent national media figure just through their tweeting.  However, popular TV shows, musicians, and politicians have gained two million followers or more through the medium.

Given this, it is a legitimate worry that the decline of blogging, and the rise of social networking, will mean that the media status quo that was once threatened by the Internet will now be reinforced by it.  Rather than new media functioning as a democratizing force, it  could become yet another tool of the status quo.  Maybe once in a while it will be used by street demonstrators against a totalitarian regime, as it was in Iran, but most of the time it will just make the already famous and the already dominant even more so.

–via “Social networking sites reinforce the status quo“

Those are the conclusions that Chris Bowers  draws from a report by the Pew Internet Centers on Social Media and Young Adults that finds that blogging is on the decline among teenage users of the Internet. Teens are also commenting less on blogs. Use among older Americans, on the other hand, remains the same.

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Some Twitter Links From Last Week

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Here are the tweets containing the most popular links from last week, counting only those that contain links shortened with ow.ly. They are copied here as they were, embarrassing typos and all.

1. Netflix Gets A Huge Influx of Indie and Foreign Films http://ow.ly/12EQc NICE!!!
2. President Obama: ‘I’m a Big Believer in Net Neutrality’ http://ow.ly/13aqs
3. This is interesting! Free Online Courses Don’t Hurt Paid Enrollment, Study Suggests http://ow.ly/13agQ And it’s wise to remember last bit.
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My Career in International Education, v 4.0

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Globes in Chicago, by John LeGear

In 2005 the Association of American Colleges and Universities launched the “Shared Futures: Global Learning and Social Responsibility” initiative. The mission statement for that initiative describes what should be one of the most important principles guiding higher education today. Shared Futures

is based upon the assumption that we live in an interdependent but unequal world and that higher education can help prepare students not only to thrive in such a world, but to remedy its inequities.

Higher education not only can prepare students to do those things, but it must, for their benefit, for the good of our nation, and because remedying inequalities is the right thing to do. Hence, as the statement continues, the academy

has a vital role of expanding knowledge about the world’s peoples and problems and developing individuals who will advance equity and justice both at home and abroad.

These are fine and noble ideals, but they are also solidly rooted in reality. The United States finds itself involved in two wars at the moment, and neither is with a neighbor or even a nation in this hemisphere. The largest share of our foreign debt is owned by China. America is a nation addicted to television, yet only Zenith makes television sets in the US, maintaining one factory so that it is able to claim it is an American producer. Problems like global warming can only be tackled on an international scale, and when the mortgage crisis hit the banks in the United States, many of the world’s banks also felt the impact. The engine of globalization is, of course, technology, which makes it almost as easy to conduct business between Boston and Hong Kong (8,000 miles) as it is between Boston and Cambridge (next to one another).
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