Harvard University Arts & Sciences faculty voted on February 12 to give the University a worldwide license to publish their scholarly articles online, making them available free of charge. This act on the part of a world-class university will be seen as a major step in the expansion of the open access movement. Harvard faculty will continue to retain copyright for their articles, subject to the University's license, but will be allowed to obtain a waiver of the license in particular cases.
Happy 2008, everybody. Let's start the new year with a look back. Thanks to modern technology and the fortuitous discovery of an archival audiotape, we are privileged to listen again to the words of Ernest Arbuckle, Dean of the Stanford Business School, and his colleagues Professors Theodore Kreps and Alexander Bavelas, in a recording of a 1959 symposium on business education. Enjoy this rare opportunity to venture back in time by going to our GSB Oral History Program webpage. (Special thanks to Instructional Techology Media Services for their work). While there, check out the latest news about the Program, which is dedicated to recovering and preserving the institutional memory of the School.
UC Berkeley has begun to publish its lectures on YouTube, the first university to team up with the video-sharing site to offer full courses online. It's the latest move to bring higher education to the masses through the Web.
"YouTube is an extension of our reach," said Ben Hubbard, co-manager of webcast.berkeley.edu, the program that gathers the lectures and makes them available online. "We feel strongly as a public institution that we should be providing a window into the intellectual riches of our university." Some 200 clips, representing eight semesterlong courses on bioengineering, physics, and chemistry, etc. are available at youtube.com/ucberkeley. More courses are expected to be added.
UC Berkeley already was posting videos on Google, which acquired YouTube last year for $1.65 billion. Before the videos were shifted to YouTube, they were viewed 1.3 million times and downloaded 700,000 times. On UC Berkeley's local site, the school's lectures were seen 4.3 million times last year. And on iTunes, some 2 million podcasts have been downloaded since April 2006.
So guess which one has received the top view? A lecture from the School of Information and Management Systems, SIMS141 Search Engines, Technology, and Business with Sergey Brin, Co-Founder, Google receives a total of 46,414 views so far.
Source: SFGate.com
GSB Professor Bob Sutton ( The No Asshole Rule, Hard Facts ) has made BusinessWeek's top 10 list , an honor roll of business school professors "who are influencing contemporary business thinking beyond the halls of academia". Is he happy? Sure. Is he flattered? Yup. But he is simultaneously dismayed that of all 10, nary a one is female. Read his musing on this and other considerations in the latest entry on his blog.
The Fischbowl blog highlights the 2nd annual K-12 Online Conference, designed for teachers, administrators and educators around the world interested in the use of Web 2.0 tools in classrooms and professional practice. This year’s conference is scheduled over two weeks, October 15-19 and October 22-26 of 2007, and will include a pre-conference keynote during the week of October 8. The conference theme is "Playing with Boundaries."
There will be four conference 'strands' -- two each week. Two presentations will be published in each strand each day, so four new presentations will be available each day. Each presentation will be given in any of a variety of downloadable, web based formats. Interested parties are encouraged to submit proposals now; deadline for proposals is June 18.
The MBA curriculum at the Stanford Graduate School of Business is undergoing a major change – and a shift is underway at many peer schools as well. According to a new article by Anne Fisher in Fortune, MIT, Wharton, Tuck, Chicago, Darden and other top biz schools are responding to needs voiced by corporate recruiters -- and their own students -- to increase the emphasis on analytical and interpersonal skills. Read more about this important transformation.
On March 21st, the Wall Street Journal launched a new online discussion forum for students. Noted WSJ journalists will host discussions and answer the questions about topics and events important to students. The first forum led by WSJ economics writers David Wessel and Greg Ip is devoted to discussion of the Federal Reserve Bank's announcement regarding short-term interest rates. To learn more and to participate in forum visit The Student Discussion Forum.
The year 2006 was the start of the Japan - China 21st Century Exchange Program, which enables high school students from each country to visit the other, specifically promoting interaction among a younger generation that will determine the future relationship between these two nations. According to the March Japan Journal, more than 1,000 Chinese students will have visited Japan via the program by the end of March 2007 (200 Japanese students have correspondingly visited China.) Of course, apart from the program there are thousands of other students studying in each others' countries, though not part of this explicit effort to build bridges. Relations between the countries go far back; for example, the Kenzuishi (embassies to Sui Dynasty China) began exactly 1400 years ago, in 607 AD. Read more in the issue in Jackson Library.
A new journal, the Journal of Industrial Organization Education, is making its debut. The journal publishes peer-reviewed lectures, experiments, and teaching advice for undergraduate, graduate, and professional courses on industrial organization. It is being launched by the Berkeley Electronic Press. Interested? Read more.
"This is the era of the undergraduate business student", pronounces James Danko, Dean of Villanova University's School of Business. "Employers are starting to look toward undergraduate markets when they're recruiting and hiring," Danko continues. "The reality is that undergraduate programs are really hot right now." Is he right? The article 'Bachelor No. 1' in the November / December BizEd argues that today's undergrad biz majors are taking trips overseas, getting hands-on learning, and developing leadership skills ... just like MBA students. Like the top MBA schools, undergraduate programs are also turning more to school rankings. Noting this, Daniel Smith of Indiana University's Kelley School of Business tells his colleagues, "Our lives will never be the same." But Smith feels it's all worthwhile: "MBAs can sometimes be jaded. But if you tell undergraduates that they could be the next Bill Gates or Martha Stewart, they actually believe it. It's awesome." Check it all out in Jackson Library.
Is making a profit without bending your code of ethics the business world's Catch-22? What do you say?
BusinessWeek asked undergrads at the George Washington University's School of Business whether business-school ethics classes actually make students more ethical. Here is what they say.
The October 23 New Yorker has a review by Anthony Grafton of historian William Clark's book Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University. According to 'The Nutty Professors', Clark outlines the historical evolution of the professorial profession, highlighting superstars like mediaeval theologian Abelard, whom Grafton calls the 'first Parisian intellectual', Michael Maestlin, astronomer and instructor to Kepler, and legendary German historian and Nobel laureate Theodor Mommsen. Grafton feels Clark doesn't quite fully explain how academics came to possess inherent charisma, as opposed to the formal authority they possess, but he does pinpoint the importance of 'asceticism' in creating an impression of greatness -- citing examples such as Friedrich August Wolf, author of the 1795 hit Prolegomena to Homer, a nonconformist who famously abstained from pleasures to devote himself with monk-like diligence to his studies.
Perhaps the most amusing part of the article is the awed account by Mark Twain of Mommsen's appearance at a Berlin banquet in 1892, where Twain -- himself no stranger to celebrity -- saw a thousand German students go berserk and raise the rafters with their extreme exuberance for the famed professor.
You may find a copy of this book at Education (Cubberley) Library.
Gaming's for children! Or is it? 'Gaming: Let Yourself Fail Forward' is the cover story of the October issue of Associations Now. "Don't kid yourself," author Elliott Masie cautions. "Online games, once the province of the young, could soon change the way your association delivers education and certification programs."
The piece is framed as an interview of two virtual characters, Silver Merit and NextGen Opus, in the world of Second Life -- a growing multiplayer gaming environment on the 'island' of LearnLand where Fortune 500 companies are experimenting with gaming. The characters discuss how gaming is a universal human experience, how it can be conducive to learning and meetings, and how your association can implement virtual environments for training purposes. A sidebar cites the experience of PriceWaterhouseCoopers, who created a virtual simulation game to help their auditors, many in their 20s, to quickly learn about financial derivatives.
From philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) comes inspiration for the Crooked Timber academic blog site: "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."
This well-known site contains academic blogs in a wide range of fields -- psychology, law, sociology, computer science, political science, history -- divided by discipline. Here you'll find blogs for lesser known figures in the academic firmament, as well as 'media stars' like Noam Chomsky. Ongoing discussions can range from DDT to Chinese university curricula to animal rights to creationism to political lobbying to sporting goods.
In an innovative move to share its intellectual treasures with the public, UC Berkeley announced last week that it is delivering educational content, including course lectures and symposia, free of charge through Google Video. Meanwhile, course offerings have increased on the Berkeley on iTunes U service.
Not Cole Porter, but the Princeton Review. The Review names Stanford one of the top in its latest annual Best Business Schools. It does not create an overall ranking, but offers 'best schools' in various categories. Rankings are based on random, student-driven opinion, including opinions from students at any schools -- or anyone who wishes to cast a vote at the Princeton Review site.
On to the good news: Stanford's GSB is rated 4th in 'Family Friendly', 4th in 'Best Campus Environment', and 1st in 'Best Career Prospects'. And for overall academic experience, the GSB ranks above both Harvard and Yale.
In ' Demise of the Public Intellectual', Peter Klein talks about Mark Oppenheimer's cri de coeur about the fading of scholars who write for the informed public or academics reading outside their specializations. Oppenheimer: "I have long believed that admissions committees at graduate schools should work very differently. Instead of asking for letters of recommendation from undergraduate thesis advisers, admissions committees should try to figure out if an applicant is an intellectual."
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