Storify: Worldviews Pre-Conference Event [April 16 2013]

Here is a Storify of the tweets from the Worldviews Pre-conference on April 16th.

Inside Higher Ed: Lazy Higher Ed Journalism [January 17, 2012]

I started the piece that turned into this essay after reading one too many news items about the same themes in higher education. it’s amusing to read it now, since certain ed-tech themes have come to dominate the discussion so heavily throughout 2012 and 2013. But much of this I’d say is still the same, including the points about rankings, the obsession with whether higher education is “worth it” (and exactly what it’s worth–forms of proof), and the concern with competitive recruiting of (the best) international students.

Speculative Diction: Pragmatic Preoccupations [April 19 2013]

I wrote a blog post as a re-cap from the Worldviews Pre-Conference  event on April 16th at the University of Toronto. As my example when I spoke on this panel, I discussed the media rhetoric about MOOCs and how it reflects various aspects of the current context of postsecondary education and its “crisis”.

Speculative Diction: Universities and the Media [June 22 & 23, 2011]

Following the first Worldviews conference in June 2011, I wrote two posts that take up the issue of media coverage of universities and postsecondary education. This is a topic that interests me partly because it beings together two areas that I’ve been looking at for some time – media studies (and discourse analysis), and PSE.

Universities and the media, part 1: What they say about us.

Universities and the media, part 2: Why the media matter.

Another angle that I haven’t been able to dig into very much is the influence of media coverage on policy-making in higher education. I did do a presentation on the 2008-2009 CUPE strike at York University and how this was discussed/debated in public and in the news, but I haven’t yet done an in-depth piece about coverage of universities in the long term, which would  really have to be a book-length project. However, I have been able to use some of this kind of analysis as part of my dissertation research.