In January I wrote that I believe online learning is possible, but I have doubts about whether online courses are an adequate substitute for in-person college classes, let alone an improvement. One of those doubts concerns trust and intellectual honesty. Any course is an exchange. The students pay money to the college, the instructor gets a cut, and the students get something of value in return. What that something is can be disputed.

It seems to me that there are two types of “post-critical” articulations. Felski et al are calling for a turn away from the idea that we should employ critique to analyse texts. That is, a call for a type of aesthetic formalism entwined with an appreciation of social entanglement. Latour also suggests turning away from critique in his “Why is Critique Running Out of Steam?” – but, that is, a critique of science.

Since July 2016 I have been working as Associate Application Systems in the Teaching and Learning Applications group at Columbia University. I have developed several apps, including this Photo Roster, an LTI plugin to the Canvas Learning Management System. The back end of the Photo Roster is written in Python and Flask.

The Lenovo G580 comes with Windows 8. It is possible to permanently lock yourself out of the operating system if you begin with a Microsoft account and migrate this to a local account.

The Problem You’ve probably heard the joke about the two people camping in the woods who encounter a hungry predator. One person stops to put on running shoes. The other says, “Why are you wasting time? Even with running shoes you’re not going to outrun that animal!” The other replies, “I don’t have to outrun the animal, I just have to outrun you.” For me this joke highlights a problem with the way some people argue about climate change.

Some thoughts to myself now voiced out loud. Meta-ethical moral relativism holds that there is no objective wrong or right between parties with different ethical views. Normative moral relativism holds that one should therefore tolerate each of these views. For many years, the political right railed against both of these forms of moral relativism.

Consortial OA funding models such as Knowledge Unlatched, the Open Library of Humanities, and others are non-classical economic setups. They are susceptible to free riders. These models have worked thus far because: Academic libraries are not necessarily classical economic actors; They spread the cost well and are often cheaper than options under the classical model; They are aligned with the desire of most library actors to achieve open access;

Cheap it is not, but the Folio Society Edition of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker is a beautiful item to behold. The edition itself is limited to a run of 1,000 copies signed by the illustrator, Quentin Blake, and ours is #15. The illustrations themselves are wonderful.

There are 100 people in a room. They have $10 each. The academic speaker will give them a talk but the venue wants $50 to cover its costs (and any profit/surplus). There are 40 such talks per year. There is final indefinitely large group of people (let us call them “the general public”) who might want to hear the talk but who can’t afford to pay anything. Subscription logic: each person pays $0.50 and gets access to the talk.

One of the things we have to contend with at the Open Library of Humanities is the fact that libraries will evaluate our performance and decide whether or not to renew their subscriptions/memberships. This makes sense and is only to be expected. A few thoughts struck me about this, though. One of the core questions that some librarians have been asking is: how many articles from our researchers are appearing in these journals?