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

Posted on March 5, 2010 by MikeT

“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

Posted on February 26, 2010 by MikeT

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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Academic Freedom Media Review, February 12-19

Posted on February 21, 2010 by MikeT

Compiled by Scholars at Risk

Alabama Shooting Puts Spotlight on Tenure Process
The Associated Press, The New York Times, 2/18

Publish and be dumped?
Laurie Taylor, The Times Higher Education, 2/18

Is Heckling a Right?
Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, 2/17

Education is the key for the future of Belarus
Bertel Haarder, Cristina Husmark Pehrsson, Rigmor Aasrud, Jan Vapaavuori, Katrin Jakobsdottir and Halldor Asgrimsson, EuObserver, 2/17

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Clash of the Titans: Google and Facebook infringe on one another’s turf

Posted on February 11, 2010 by MikeT

Have you heard about Google Buzz?

An article from Business Insider provides some information on the context into which the service emerges.

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My Career in International Education, v 4.0

Posted on February 1, 2010 by MikeT

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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Study Abroad as a Collective Priority and Technology

Posted on January 21, 2010 by MikeT

There’s an article in Peer Review, a publication of the AAC&U that caught my attention recently. In “Transforming the Study Abroad Experience into a Collective Priority” Ross Lewin, Director of Study Abroad at the University of Connecticut advocates for a more holistic approach to the study abroad experience. In recent years there has been a growing emphasis on including some sort of experience abroad in undergraduate education, in response to the challenges of the global age, but Lewis raises concerns that the way these experiences are too often conducted does little to equip students to better compete of function as responsible citizens in the global age. Indeed, too often study abroad is little more than a vacation in some friendly European capital or seaside town. The solution, he argues, is to make the study abroad experience a collective priority.

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TweetDeck for iPhone Now the Matches Standards of the Desktop App

Posted on November 12, 2009 by MikeT

If you are a contented user of TweetDeck who, like me, got excited when the iPhone app came out a while back, you probably also like me, found yourself wondering what the iPhone app the desktop app had to do with one another besides branding. They had the same color scheme and logo, but aside from that there were at least half a dozen Twitter apps for iPhone that were as good or better when it came to interacting with twitter. There’s a lot of competition in that area. And TweetDeck for iPhone didn’t interface with Facebook either. That was one of the best things about the desktop app.

But now there is a new version. I’d written the iPhone version of TweetDeck off and was waiting for Seesmic to launch their iPhone app, but I was told I should try it, I did, and it has much more in common with the desktop app than just branding. Just check out the web page for the app and all the features marked with “new” tags. You’ll see what I mean.
For instance, you can drink beet juice, viagra generic cheap eat healthy, exercise, manage stress and quit smoking. But you can never forget what you have to say – or even remember who you are. best levitra price This drug starts effecting after 45-50 minutes and remains longer in the male body to give an ideal penile erection during sexual activities. buy cialis from canada Also, Marriage Counseling Jacksonville strongly viagra best buy suggests you make use of your communication time for something positive and avoid permitting your negativities and frustrations to come to a decision.
Oh, and I should also mention that in TweetDeck on the iPhone you can update your status using Arabic script or any other alphabet with characters that still don’t display when used in the desktop app.

Two Funny Things From CollegeHumor.com

Posted on November 4, 2009 by MikeT

I love CollegeHumor.com. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in college, but it cracks me up. I’m not sure how in touch with college kids it is, though. I mean, how many 18-22 year olds know the music from West Side Story. Anyway, here are two clips from the site I’ve particularly enjoyed. There not new, both from the summer. But they were brought up today, I looked at them again, and wanted to share.

Web Site Story

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Googling With Bing
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