… big mo.
… big mo.
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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte
July 17th, 2012 at 1:54PM
This article (as Jonathan Rees points out) continues to raise (but not really address) questions I have about the pedagogy of MOOCs. I raised some of these questions in the Chronicle story on your poetry course and would still be very interested in your responses, given your experience so far:
http://chronicle.com/article/Sharing-a-Passion-for-Poetry/132133/
Without consistent opportunities for evaluation and feedback, how can we know what kind of learning is actually going on? I see “peer to peer” evaluation being touted in the piece you link to here, but those of us in the humanities at least may find it difficult to believe that this will be terribly effective. It’s not that I don’t think interaction and feedback can be done online, but on the large scale of a MOOC, my imagination falters!
July 17th, 2012 at 2:13PM
Rohan: I actually think efforts to monetize and grade and credential MOOCs are doomed to come to grief. For me, the model involves an uncompensated professor speaking to an undefined world of interested non-paying people. A comment function is great – my MOOC has one, and I respond to comments – but that’s as far as I’d go.
What’s the basis for your worry about “what kind of learning’s actually going on” in this model?
July 18th, 2012 at 6:28AM
“I actually think efforts to monetize and grade and credential MOOCs are doomed to come to grief.”
Most of the people interviewed by Tamar Lewin evidently disagree, which is why I think your unqualified boosting of MOOCs is dangerous. You see them as a harmless distraction. They see them as important revenue sources for the future, and have completely bought into all this seismic-shift-reshaping-higher-education crap. Just because you don’t think monetizing MOOCs is practical doesn’t mean that they won’t go and do it anyway.
July 18th, 2012 at 6:38AM
Alan: I know. I think lots of things that are monetized shouldn’t be. That’s no reason for me to stop doing them if they’re valuable. People are always suggesting we pay blood donors. If blood donors started to be paid, I’d still donate blood.
July 18th, 2012 at 7:53AM
What I meant by that is that when we talk about someone “taking” a conventional course, we mean something more than that they buy the books or show up — there’s a reciprocal engagement and, eventually, some kind of evaluation, to find out if our teaching is being met by their learning — if, at the end of the course, they have acquired specific knowledge and skills and understanding of the course material. The rhetoric around MOOCs emphasizes that universities are “offering” and students are “taking” courses, but without that interaction and assessment we have little idea what they are in fact “taking” from them, if anything. Should we care? Perhaps not. It sounds like you see your MOOC just as a form of outreach, so the question of whether students are understanding the points in your lectures (or learning to interpret poetry themselves, or any of the other things you’d be checking for if you were teaching a conventional course) doesn’t matter to you in this context. But as Alan says, there seems to be a lot of enthusiasm for MOOCs as a potential alternative to conventional pedagogy, in which case it really does matter that we are clear with ourselves and (more important) with our administrators about what we can and can’t do with courses scaled up this way. When is a “course” not a course? might be one way to ask the question: we can do outreach in plenty of ways that aren’t packaged as courses, after all.
July 18th, 2012 at 8:34AM
Rohan: I haven’t followed everything everyone involved with MOOCs has said, but it’s not my sense that they think of these as an alternative to traditional pedagogy. Most universities seem to be describing them as indeed a form of outreach, democratization of knowledge, as well as a way of getting your university’s name out there (rather like opening a campus in a foreign country, etc.). MOOCs would, by acclamation or necessity or whatever you want to call it, always be a small specialization of any university, since they’d feature only your very best teachers, and only – among such people – teachers willing to teach without (for the moment at any rate) getting paid.
Yes, it’s clear that some universities are going to try to credentialize these courses (I have no idea whether credentialize is a word), which will involve some form of testing, etc. My belief is that any effort in this direction will be doomed because of cheating and an inability to do legitimate testing, etc., etc. Once it dooms itself, MOOCs will either disappear or will revert to what I think they should be – a form of social responsibility to which serious universities with acclaimed faculty should be attracted.
July 18th, 2012 at 10:03AM
UD, your own MOOC host Udemy seems convinced of the opposite.
July 18th, 2012 at 10:11AM
And the Coursera folks seem to think you don’t need to be among the “very best teachers”:
‘The online format also reduces the traditional lecture-hall need for professors to be spellbinding orators, Ng asserts. Being clear and logical is all that’s needed online, he says, adding: “If you’re able to sit down with your favorite niece or nephew and explain a subject to them, then you can record a class like this.”’ (http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2012/07/17/coursera-boom/)
You may be right that the effort to monetize and credentialize MOOCs is doomed, but it’s worrisome that universities led on by the kind of cheerleading seen in these articles may pour already scarce resources into trying to solve the problems you identify.
July 18th, 2012 at 10:38AM
Rohan, Alan: Here’s a good statement of my position on MOOCs:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/going-public-the-uva-way/33623
That Udemy – like various universities – wants to monetize some of its MOOCs is none of my business.
July 19th, 2012 at 1:04AM
[…] the effect of their MOOCs on colleagues both at their own universities and elsewhere. For example, here’s Margaret Soltan of University Diaries fame writing in the comments of her own blog in a long […]