John Wiley has reached an agreement with TED, the nonprofit specializing in spreading discussions on technology, entertainment, design and other subjects, to produce instructional material for TED Studies, 21 collections of curated discussions aimed at the school market and organized under academic subject categories. The Wiley/TED instructional content will be offered for free along with…
When American voters re-elected Barack Obama as president, they extended the White House stay of an administration that has focused on expanding federal student aid as well as tightening regulations on colleges and universities. Economic concerns took center stage over the course of the 2012 presidential race, as both campaigns sought to make the case…
The “remarkable recent economic growth” in many African countries may be able to sustain science through domestic funding (rather than through external sources) — but a lack of scientists and research capacity is threatening to reel back that economic growth, a meeting has heard. The gross domestic product (GDP) of many African countries has been…
Philosophy lovers, prepare to be outraged. Down in Florida, a task force commissioned by Governor Rick Scott is putting the finishing touches on a proposal that would allow the state’s public universities to start charging undergraduates different tuition rates depending on their major. Students would get discounts for studying topics thought to be in high…
Women cluster in certain fields, according to a study of millions of journal articles, while men get more credit
The following is from a guest post to the Chronicle’s WorldWise blog, written by John D. Holm, the former director of the Office of International Education and Partnerships at the University of Botswana and director of international programs at Cleveland State University: International-development experts have expressed much concern about the brain drain of African scholars…
As a biographical sketch, Darwin: Portrait of a Genius is brisk and sufficient. But as an exploration of Darwin’s theory and its effect on the world, the book feels like Paul Johnson’s weird, bitter vendetta against a scientist who was always more interested in mollusks than men. Johnson attributes to Darwin a startling majority of…
Two American economists won the Nobel Prize in economics for their research into how to match different actors in given markets, such as job seekers with employers and patients with donated kidneys. Alvin Roth of Harvard University and Lloyd Shapley of the University of California Los Angeles won the prize “for the theory of stable…
Daniel Kahneman sent an e-mail last week to a dozen social psychologists, spelling out what he sees as a way to restore the credibility of priming research. The research, which has found that small cues can cause strong subconscious effects, have come under fire after attempts to replicate some high-profile studies failed. It hasn’t helped…
From Michaela Pommells at Huffington Post: Let’s face it, race inequity may not be a deliberate goal of education policy and practice (or maybe it is) but neither is it accidental. The result is a whole lot of seemingly well-meaning people trying to evoke change in an education system that never intended to educate people…