Who teaches university students? Contract teachers
Craig McFarlane, Globe and Mail, June 23, 2013

This point has been made before, but it bears reiterating: the bulk of teaching at a university is done not by professors who lavish person al attention on their stgudents, but by underpaid and overworked graduate students or contract teachers. This article is a pretty good restatement of the position, though the second-last paragraph, which talks about online coyurse completion rates, is out of place in the column and looks like it was added after the fact by an editor.

[Link] [Comment]

Battle for the planet of the APIs
Jeremy Keith, Adactio, June 23, 2013

For the rercord, I will continue to use RSS into the indefinite future. Because, as Jeremy Keith says, "It might be that RSS is the canary in the coal mine for my data on the web. If those services don’t trust me enough to give me an RSS feed, why should I trust them with my data?" By 'those services' he means companies like Facebook and Google, who have slowly been throttling the open web, with the intention of replacing it with themselves.

[Link] [Comment]

RSS Viewer app
Dave Winer, Scripting News, June 22, 2013

So I'm reading dave Winer and he writes, "I got tired of fighting with Chrome and Safari over whether I'm allowed to read RSS files" and he offers a single-function web page to make this possible. And then I'm thinking - wait, what? Chrome and Safari are making it difficult to view RSS files? I use Firefox, so I hadn't noticed this. But how typical is it that these browsers - made by Google and Apple respectively - are set up against RSS. More and more, the open web is a threat to these companies, not an asset.

[Link] [Comment]