The Partisan and the Political This is right, mostly: But by conflating partisanship and ideology, elite discourse tends to discredit the latter; thus, just as elites tend to cloak their ideological program in the veil of post-partisanship, contemporary popular movements sometimes attempt to do the same. But they, too, are ideological whether they want to Continue reading

It’s Not How Many Followers You Have, It’s Who Follows You Yglesias gets it right — a lot of these viral success stories sold as the annals of  meritocracy are anything but. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, it just happens a lot less than you’d think. Continue reading

Occupy Wall Street protesters irked by rising student debt in U.S. Worth remembering: they may be occupying Wall Street, but for many younger people in the crowd their main issue with the financial sector is student debt, and by extension, cost of college. Maybe someone should do something about that? Continue reading

NH to make $35 million in state agency cuts [Healthcare vs. Higher Ed., Again] After last Spring’s cuts, the State of New Hampshire provides only 5% of our operational budget at Keene State College. The word on the street is this new round of cuts will reduce it to 3%.  A lot of this is Continue reading

Peer Instruction Failure I’ve been making sure to note places where experimentation shows at least partial failure of Peer Instruction. This article (“Effect of personal response systems on student perception and academic performance in courses in a health sciences curriculum”) is a good example of that. Only one of the sections fails, but it’s worth Continue reading

Increased Course Structure Improves Performance in Introductory Biology Lots of interesting (and maybe dubious?) methodological stuff in this. Its primary value for me was articulating a complex structured design fully, and testing that full design (rather than one or two smaller interventions). If you want to restructure your class like this, you could do it Continue reading