Which justifies shelling out the $$$ for my MLIS!
More employers are looking to hire candidates with advanced degrees than ever before. READ: How The Master’s Degree Became The New Bachelor’s In The Hiring World | Fast Company | Business + Innovation
During these summer months, we’ve been busy rummaging around the internet and adding new courses to our big list of Free Online Courses, which now features 1,150 courses from top universities. Let’s give you the quick overview: The list lets you download audio & video lectures from schools like Stanford, Yale, MIT, Oxford and Harvard. Generally, the courses can be accessed via YouTube, iTunes or university web sites, and you can listen to the lectures anytime, anywhere, on your computer or smart phone. We didn’t do a precise calculation, but there’s probably about 35,000 hours of free audio & video lectures here. Enough to keep you busy for a very long time. READ MORE: A Master List of 1,150 Free Courses From Top Universities: 35,000 Hours of Audio/Video Lectures | Open Culture.
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. – The University of Iowa has struck gold. Not the kind that lies in the federal reserve, but one of paper in a Sioux Falls man’s basement. After 20 years of collecting, he is donating his one-of-a-kind collection of 17,500 books worth an estimated three quarters of a million dollars. READ MORE: Sioux Falls Man Donates Collection Of Nearly 18,000 Books | KDLT.com South Dakota News
Ok, if there can be a Lego Professor there can be a Lego Librarian. I’m sure there is enough money in this trust to setup a Lego Librarianship alongside the Lego Professorship at this new Research Centre!
Everything is awesome, including this hiring news from one of the UK’s most prestigious institutions: Cambridge University is getting a Lego professor.
The university announced on Tuesday the school had accepted £2.5 million from the Lego Foundation to set up a Lego Professorship of Play in Education, Development and Learning, the Cambridge University Reporter wrote.
The foundation also gifted the school an additional £1.5 million to set up a Research Centre on Play in Education, Development, and Learning within its Faculty of Education.
One lucky professor will start the new role on October 1, 2015.
READ MORE: ‘Everything is awesome’: Cambridge University will get a Lego professor | Mashable
People now buy songs, not albums. They read articles, not newspapers. So why not mix and match learning “modules” rather than lock into 12-week university courses?
READ: Are Courses Outdated? MIT Considers Offering ‘Modules’ Instead | The Chronicle of Higher Education.
When I applied for my MLS a few years ago, the realities of the working world had me dreaming of a retreat from the outside world in the arms of academia. I pictured days spent in stimulating classes and evenings immersed in my studies, totally plugged into the world of libraries and library science at all times. I would specialize in something fantastic, meet tons of like-minded people, and not have to report to a desk job every day. Student loan debt be damned, I wanted an escape.
Shortly after hitting “send,” life intervened. Between a 500+ mile move, a new job with just enough travel to make night classes impossible, and sheer economic reality, it quickly became apparent that escaping into classes and living off student loans for two years was just not going to happen. Two years and two deferments later, I find myself almost finished with my first semester in the University of Maryland College Park’s online MLS program.
I’m happy with my decision to switch to the online program, but I do sometimes feel that I’m missing out on the intangible benefits of face-to-face learning. My day job has NOTHING to do with libraries, so I don’t get the water cooler chitchat, the special programming posters in the hallway, the classroom tangents that have nothing to do with that day’s planned discussion but are oh-so-valuable. I get online class discussion boards, and nothing more. Not quite the immersive experience I had in mind when I sent in my application, and an easy recipe for low motivation. So to keep myself from feeling totally cut off, I’ve come up with a few strategies to get my library buzz. Read more: Staying Connected as a Distance Learner | Hack Library School.
A perfect GPA isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Advancing an open source project. To help computer science students prepare for jobs (and boost its own recruiting efforts) Facebook today publicly launched Open Academy. The partnership with premier CS universities sets up a special class where students get college credit for contributing to open source projects.
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Professors aren’t so different from the regular populace when it comes to their views on social media.
Just over 70 percent used social media in their personal lives, a survey released last week by Babson Survey Research Group andPearson found. This figure mirrors usage among the general population, according to the Pew Research Center.
Babson and Pearson surveyed 8,000 faculty members from all disciplines in higher education for their report, “Social Media for Teaching and Learning.”
Faculty personally choose to use Facebook more than any other type of social media outlet, according to the report, but were more likely to use blogs and wikis for classroom assignments.
Less than half of faculty — 41 percent — use social media as a tool in class, but that’s up from 33.8 percent in last year’s survey.
“Faculty are not only expanding their use of social media, but also becoming more sophisticated in their use,” Jeff Seaman, co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group, said in a statement. “We see steady growth in adoption year over year; however, there are still great concerns that we hear from every age group, and that holds educators back from full adoption in their teaching.”
Faculty cited “integrity of student submissions” and privacy as their main concerns with social media use. Privacy was a large concern among previous surveys of the general population as well.
Wisconsin’s public university system will start granting some degrees based on testing instead of credits, and letting you use as much of the school as you want for a flat fee. Schools around the country are watching.
For generations, including this one, women in science have remained underrepresented and underrecognized. On Oct. 15, 2013, from 3 p.m. to 8:30 p.m, people who want to change that can gather at a Wikipedia “edit-a-thon” to increase the representation of women in science and technology. The event marks Ada Lovelace Day, named for the 19th-century female scientist who pioneered computational programming.
infophile 