Western and Japanese educators face some of the same issues, even while their common-sense social organization and practices could hardly stand in greater contrast. Contentious issues in North America–such as core liberal arts requirements vs. vocationalization of higher education, the student as customer, or faculty treatment in terms of…[Read more]

Despite a period of almost two decades in which quantitative approaches in historical linguistics have been increasingly used, gaining constantly more popularity even among predominantly qualitatively oriented linguists, we find many problems in the field of computational historical linguistics, which have only sporadically been addressed. In the…[Read more]

Handouts the author developed for classes in Japan requiring papers in English, from regular undergraduate EFL classes to graduate school international classes. Page 1 A) Outline of an Academic Paper: necessary elements, color-coded to show connections between parts of a paper; and B) Abstracts: often confused with introductions, need to stand…[Read more]

By comparing the languages of the world, we gain invaluable insights into human prehistory, predating the appearance of written records by thousands of years. The traditional methods for language comparison are based on manual data inspection. With more and more data available, they reach their practical limits. Computer applications, however,…[Read more]

A paper at the first annual Teaching in the Community Colleges Online Conference in 1996, the first large-scale wholly online academic conference, which continues today, based at the University of Hawaii. In 1995 peaceful post-War Japan was struck by the Great Hanshin Earthquake and the Tokyo subway sarin terrorism incident by the home-grown Aum…[Read more]

A report published by the Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission this week, ‘Elitist Britain’, found that two fifths (39%) of Britain’s ‘leading people’ were educated privately, more than five times as many as in the population as a whole, with almost one quarter (24%) graduating from Oxbridge. I therefore thought it would be timely to publis…[Read more]

While the evolution of spoken languages is well understood and has been studied using traditional historical comparative methods as well as newer computational phylogenetic methods, evolutionary processes resulting in the diversity of contemporary sign languages are poorly understood, and scholars have been largely unsuccessful in grouping sign…[Read more]

This essay argues, through various personal anecdotes, for a university in which our work and lives would turn away from impersonal professionalism and more towards a praxis where we would recognize better, as Brantley Bryant has written, that our “very strength, our very expertise, comes from darkness, indeterminacy, unmarketably disastrous…[Read more]

A syllabus for an undergraduate course, taught in English, on the visual culture (primarily film, photography, and aesthetic theory) of the Weimar Republic. The course is housed in German Studies and crosslisted with Art History, Cinema, and other departments.

We present a fully automated workflow for phylogenetic reconstruction on large datasets, consisting of two novel methods, one for fast detection of cognates and one for fast Bayesian phylogenetic inference. Our results show that the methods take less than a few minutes to process language families that have so far required large amounts of time…[Read more]

This study examines factors influencing the decision of an academic major and/or minor by undergraduate students at a private university location in Central Texas. A total of 386 students taking courses in the university’s College of Business were surveyed. Participants were asked to provide the top five factors influencing their choice in an a…[Read more]

On applying the language learning method “Where Are Your Keys?” (WAYK) to the teaching of Western Armenian at a community weekend school.

On applying the language learning method “Where Are Your Keys?” (WAYK) to the teaching of Western Armenian at a community weekend school.

Introduction to Althusser’s concept of ideological reproduction, written for those with little to no theory experience.

With the advance of neoliberal globalization in the 1990s, lifelong learning emerged in the policy frameworks of the United States, Canada, and the EU. Neoliberal policies during this era worked to orchestrate personal development within the increasingly flexible processes of global capitalism, placing both within the rhythm of a personal life…[Read more]

The objects of science education are transformed, degraded and disappeared for many reasons, and sometimes take other things with them when they go. This close reading of an undergraduate physiology laboratory report demonstrates how the kymograph was never a stand-alone instrument, but intertwined with conceptual frameworks and technical skills,…[Read more]

If art, education, and research always – up to some extent – put us in contact with things yet to be known, yet to be thought, what to say about this anticipation of something taking place, especially if this something ought to take place through our work? In this talk, I approach this question through a series of vignettes – ethics, polit…[Read more]

In the last decade, there has been an international resurgence of interest in the philosophy of Louis Althusser. New essays, journalism, collections, secondary literature, and even manuscripts by Althusser himself are emerging, speaking in fresh ways to audiences of theorists and activists. Althusser is especially important in educational thought,…[Read more]

This module will deal with the study of a few texts written in Medieval and Early Modern Europe related to Witchcraft, Heresy and Inquisition. The main purpose of this course is to consider how some patterns and stereotypes in the European cultural history of the past use to appear also in our current times. The outline below gives the general…[Read more]

Slides from Renata Kobetts Miller’s (City College of New York) presentation as part of the panel on “The Problems and Possibilities of Parenting in the Academy.”