Those who love learning and love students can transform the landscape of higher education and create the kind of vibrant, intelligent, and socially rich campus communities that everyone deserves. And they can do it anywhere by sweeping out the broken, wasteful structures that have caused so much damage, and by replacing them with small, faculty-led residential colleges. We owe nothing less to the future. As one of the cleverest students I have ever known once asked, “Why are we here if we’re not magic?”

When this transformation has been accomplished, what will the landscape of higher education be like? It will be a landscape of small, stable homes that are academic and genuinely diverse, and that have long memories.

@ The Collegiate Way
(via GlobalHigherEd)

The mere fact that there are so many people whose livelihood depends on the humanities, and that the humanities have a certain lingering cultural capital associated with them, and a resultant snob appeal, does not mean that they are necessarily capable of exercising any real cultural authority. This is where the second sense of burden comes ­in—­the humanities as reclamation task. The humanities cannot be saved by massive increases in funding. But they can be saved by men and women who believe in ­them.

~ Wilfred M. McClay
(via Jerz)

My job search hasn’t been going so well, and I was thinking I might do something different for a while, maybe be the caretaker at a big, remote house somewhere. The wife and the kid and I could get away from the crazy, crowded, frustrating world to someplace quiet. I’d get some writing done, we’d be alone with ourselves, the works. It became more idyllic and alluring the longer I thought about it. But then my idea started to sound a little familiar…

As our culture becomes increasingly digital, the art forms that support it must be constructed with the same care, deliberateness, and gusto as our traditional media. Intelligent content is the literature of our time. It is not enough that our printed books and magazines are ardently written and meticulously edited. Our culture loses much if we encourage online writers to sacrifice grace and personality on the altars of pith and scannability. Perhaps better advice is to encourage writers to say exactly what they mean with precisely the words required, however many they may be.

~ Amber Simmons @ A List Apart

New strategies for job search:

1. Show up daily. Look busy. Wait some months. Ask for salary reassessment, citing reliable performance.
2. Put self on ebay.
3. File for personal non-profit status. Continue present non-profitability.
4. Build time machine. Travel backward until meagre savings become a fortune.
5. Hire calligraphist. Change ‘MFA’ into ‘MBA.’
6. Sew bear suit. Live at zoo. Enjoy free meals, frequent swimming.
7. Befriend celebrities. Blog.
8. Plastics.
9. Transfer funds for Nigerian royal family.
10. Lower expectations.
11. …

Some dreamers hope their new states will be the lands in which they can be (or might have been in some previous age) their own kings and queens and heroes, in which they can play with dreams of power and glory without fear of failure, as the Brontë sisters did in composing their childhood epics of the kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. Indeed, Bruno Fuligni, in his study of ephemeral states and micronations, L’Etat, c’est Moi, calls such entities private monarchies or, perhaps more accurately, cryptarchies.

But the actual state can’t be set aside at will. One can’t merely nail a declaration of independence to one’s front door and bid the state farewell. Failing to pay taxes, for instance, will soon make one’s true sovereign, the non-fictional state supported by lawyers and policemen, exercise its power to collect.

@ Cabinet

I eagerly anticipate at some as yet undetermined point in the future having a complex thought of which I do not later discover Jay David Bolter has already said a portion, both more intelligently and a decade earlier.

@ Planned Obsolescence

But some educators are going a step further, teaching kids to make the games themselves. It turns out to be perhaps the ultimate form of liberal arts. In order to create a computer game you have to think about the content. You have to write a script. The programming involves logic, math and science. And to understand how you distribute a game you have to get into issues of marketing, sociology, and Internet culture. Panelist Rafael Fajardo, a professor at the University of Denver, says that his program, which teaches teachers how to teach kids to make games, is working to “change the culture of education.”

@ Fortune

Welcome to Zombinc!

We are a staffing service that allows you to employ zombies – those single-minded, hard working individuals – instead of shiftless human workers. Zombies can work tirelessly around the clock, they retain the talents of their former lives, and if injured or unable to work because of decomposition, we can give you a new one at no extra cost or liability!

Many times I’ve seen sensible people drop their inhibitions the minute they enter a MOO, a chatroom, or more recently Second Life. I haven’t seen it happen so often via voice on applications like Skype – perhaps the voice is a little too real for such behaviour. But it’s clear that newbies often feel shrouded and hidden in the jungle of virtuality, and thus enabled to misbehave in a somewhat exhilerated way. Sherry Turkle has written about this phenomenon quite widely. I’m mentioning it here because I think it works as a nature metaphor – the web as jungle or forest. I’ve written elsewhere about the web as the site of The Tempest but now I’m also thinking that it’s a kind of Midsummer Night’s Dream, just like the one that takes place across the river from me every summer.

~ Sue Thomas