Education & Scholarship

 This week I read three articles: 1. Connectivism Defined by Downes 2.  Digitial Identities by Stewart 3. Seven Habits of Highly Conected People by Downes      The central focus of these was in the online self and connecting with others.  The argument is made that in order to connect with others, you must be online and engaged in the community where your research and conversational areas are taking place. If you are only writing work and not taking teh time to read, then you are not a part fo the conversation and cannot be aware of what is going on around you. I do wonder, though, how much can be done without some awareness of the conversations going on aruond us. If I, as someone with an interest in computational thinking, want to contribute and go about learning more in the area of computational thinking, then I do need to build my work on that of others and be aware of what is going on in the world around me. If I am not aware of the literature, for example, I may not be aware th

This week I readetwo articles: How Faculty Define Quality, Prestige and Impact of of Academic Journals  and  The University Cannot Love You It is quickly pointed out in the first article that it is research that dominates the life of a professor, even if they are working at a university in which they are not focused on research. And the female faculty feel more pressure to publish articles than do their male counterparts. And yet, they publish fewer articles per year.  This leads me to wonder what these faculty are doing with the time that they put into their jobs. They have the same responsiblities within the scope of their employment as do the rest of their colleagues and they feel the pressure more minutely, and yet they publish less  often? However, there is some question in my mind about how the stereotype of the wizened and isolated old white man in academia came to be the one who is allowed to puiblishall of the papers. Clearly it is even expected. In fact, I recently found out