Designing Projects for the Digital Generation: The History of Biology Thumbnails Project

Emmie Miller, of Colorado, is a second-year graduate student at the University of Minnesota. Although she loves 20th/21st century zebrafish, she actually studies the relationship between humans and non-human animals in the early modern period. In December, she published a blog post at Shells and Pebbles entitled, "Dissecting the 'Chain of Creation': Edward Tyson and Anatomical Natural History," which she also discussed at an 2014 HSS Meeting session. Follow her on Twitter.
___

One difficult thing about being an instructor today is the concern that students, distracted by their buzzing phones and binging Facebook apps, don’t care to learn because they’re preoccupied with what’s trending. In addition to being sidetracked by their interpersonal relationships, higher priority classes, and other things of real significance, they are inundated with diverting alerts from their handheld media. This deserves to be reframed – our students now learn in different ways. We as instructors should realize that every time they text in class on their smartphone, they are playing right into our hands, but only if we are willing to incorporate into our teaching strategies the technology that so thoroughly captures their attention.

Editorial: Journals Under Threat

The European Reference Index for the Humanities has a plan for grading the premier journals in our discipline.

"This joint Editorial is being published in journals across the fields of history of science and science studies as an expression of our collective dissent and our refusal to allow our field to be managed and appraised in this fashion. We have asked the compilers of the ERIH to remove our journals
titles from their lists."

The four page editorial contains a long list (nearly two full pages) of HSTM journals. Worth a look.

Non-Tenure Track Instructors

There is an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed today about contingent, that is, non-tenure-track faculty: Nearly Half of Undergraduate Courses Are Taught by Non-Tenure-Track Instructors.

I was particularly struck by the quote from Marc Bousquet, author of How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (2008): "Most people who are paying tuition are shocked to discover the actual numbers of people who are teaching on a contingent basis, and they're shocked to discover the actual salary that they're being paid."

Really? Do undergraduates care if the prof. is tenure-tracked?

The article is essentially a write-up of the American Federation of Teachers' report "Reversing Course: The Troubled State of Academic Staffing and a Path Forward."

Join the group on LinkedIn

I've created a group for graduates, and future graduates, of the HST, HMed, and HSTM Programs at the University of Minnesota: http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/820557.

Let me know if you can think of something in the public domain that we can use for an image.