Multilitteratus Incognitus

This post is going to be badly formatted because I have yet to find an Android client for blogger that it as nice as BlogPress on my iPhone. <br> While on vacation, and on a train, I was able to catch up on the news in academia. One thing that came up, among the oodles on MOOC news is the question of whether MOOCs are just online courses (see here: http://www.thegoodmooc.com/2013/06/are-moocs-becoming-just-online-courses.html?m=1 ). <br> It's an interesting question and the answer, at least for me, is: "it depends". One off the big questions is how many people are active in the course, or in other words "how maybe is massive?" The design of a course will differ based on how many people actually participate. You could have a MOOC that resembles a traditional online course, you could have a MOOC that resembles a self-paced course and you could have a MOOC that resembles any one of the many existing field of instruction. <br> The underlying ...

While on vacation a friend and colleague sent me a small article warning about the end of the professoriate as a viable career . I was quite curious about it so I had a quick look (after all, it was about MOOCs in part, and I had a little spare time in the middle of the day once museums closed). On the surface it seems like an interesting conversation starter, but for me that's all it is: a conversation starter. I would have loved to hear more of Cary Nelson's speech where the blurb of "If we lose this battle for intellectual property, it's over. Being a professor will no longer be a viable career. It will be a service industry. That's it.” It's hard to speak more cogently about this without hearing the entire context. That said, I do think that this is an interesting point to dissect on its own, assuming of course that there isn't any other information that modifies this statement. Personally I think that the battle for IP has been lost for quite some t...

These couple of weeks that have passed I have been on vacation. While on vacation I was able to meet with a colleague that has taught for my applied linguistics department. We didn't plan to talk shop but the discussion did veer toward linguistics. <br> <br> We started talking about text messaging and linguistic research, and of course what can SMS linguistic data tell us about user behavior and communication. Then I had a brainstorm: I'd love to see results of research (or participate in research) that compares text messages with telegrams. They both are meant to be quick, short, and to convey a message. I think this would be a great line of research. I wonder where one could get a corpus of telegram text.