As the climate crisis deepens, geoengineering options are in the air.  My question for today is: should academia support and advance geoengineering research, development, and deployment, or should higher education do its best to resist any such efforts? To explain: geoengineering in this context refers to artificial interventions into the total Earth system in order to reduce global warming.  There are many ways we can mount such projects.  Altering the

Last night and this morning I worked hard on climate change and higher education, writing up two book chapters and a blog post.  But I’m not going to blog about that today, because the latest COVID developments are so urgent and fast-moving. Here I’m going to outline a leaked CDC document, then point to some possibilities for higher education. This week the Washington Post published an internal CDC Powerpoint stack

Podcasts are a versatile medium that have become more and more a part of the higher education landscape. Your students may encounter podcasts alongside other materials in their reading and listening assignments; your colleagues may use podcasts in place of lecture videos and you might even consider asking students to create their own podcast episodes to demonstrate their learning. This blog covers major considerations to take into account when using

Following on from the blog posts I’ve been editor of for the ALT blog (thanks to Julie and Mimi as authors of the five-part recruitment series), I wanted to give my own experience of reviewing some 400 applications, conducting over 50 online interviews and appointing some amazing people to over 15 roles (some new roles, some replacement vacancies) during the last 18 months (since we entered lockdown and started working

Digital Bodies The Shenzen China tech company, INMO, may not be the most well-known player in the immersive tech sector, but they’ve staked out space with new AR Glasses on Indiegogo. Most developments ... Read more This article INMO AIR Offers New AR Glasses on Indiegogo first appeared on Digital Bodies by Emory Craig .

How might higher education change if society moves beyond the neoliberal order? Scholar Chris Newfield recently published a fine set of scenarios for future colleges and universities.  It is very much worth your time to explore.  Here I’ll set the stage and sketch it out as an introduction. Newfield is the great scholar of how American states have defunded public higher ed.  In a series of books he has investigated

Duke Learning Innovation co-hosted the 2021 Pandemic Pedagogy Research Symposium on May 5, alongside institutional partners: the Center for Academic Innovation at the University of Michigan, Penn’s Online Learning Initiative, the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning at Princeton, and the Stanford Center for Professional Development. The Symposium featured presentations and panel discussions on new and emerging research related to teaching and learning during the pandemic with a focus on

As a result of the pandemic, Piazza made several changes to their product and business model; an additional set of changes is scheduled for August 1 (full details). These changes have forced Duke and other institutions to review the long-term feasibility of continuing to offer Piazza as a university-wide tool. Based on feedback from faculty, a review of Piazza’s new terms of service and pricing models, and a review

My last post, on July 5th, was to announce I’d be off my blog, Twitter, LinkedIn and, for the most part, Facebook too from July 9th. This was to be my first ‘official’ social media blackout where I not only log out of work apps on my phone and tablet (and delete to make it harder to check) but also a concerted effort to stay away from the temptation of

Backchannels — instances that provide course members with supplemental communication space to hold a background conversation during synchronous sessions  — have been used as a teaching and learning strategy in higher education long before the onset of COVID-19. But Zoom became a common tool for this purpose last academic year. Students, for instance, could ask questions in Zoom chat, while the instructor gave a presentation, or shyer students had the