HOME |
RSS | 
Junior, an agency in Australia, made a brochure for a criminology course at Griffith University that goes way beyond a trifold flyer. It’s like an ad for CSI!
Link via Super Punch
The University of Florida is now offering a three-credit course on the computer game StarCraft in its graduate school on business management. The doctoral student behind the idea says that the game teaches players how to wisely allocate scarce resources:
“My problem solving skills in StarCraft are the same problem solving skills learned in school or the real world,” declares Nate Poling, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Florida and the instructor behind EME2040: 21st Century Skills in StarCraft.[...]
“In StarCraft you’re managing a lot of different units and groups of different capacities,” says Poling. “It’s not a stretch to think of that in the business world or in the work of a healthcare administrator.”
Poling points out that people who manage hospitals, factories, small businesses and, say, nuclear power plants all have to manage people who have different abilities, and that they might have learned a thing or two about this process from StarCraft, which demands the same kind of resource and unit management.
Link via Kotaku | Photo by Flickr user STARFEEDER used under Creative Commons license
University libraries are sometimes the beneficiary of someone’s collect works, or collected obsessions. After all, when a relative doesn’t have use for 400-year-old glass eyeballs, wouldn’t the local college take them? Mental_floss takes a look at eleven such strange “special collections” you can read or see at our institutions of higher learning.
Yearning to learn more about your kidneys? Head to the University of North Carolina’s Carl W. Gottschalk Collection. The 12,400-item collection houses legendary medical professor Gottschalk’s passion: historical items related to the study of kidneys. Gottschalk’s medical research focused on the kidneys, and throughout his life he managed to collect texts, engravings, woodcuts, and other relics on the subject that dated back to the 16th century.
Shown is Dr. Gottschalk’s kidney-shaped desk. Other collections focus on bloodletting, witchcraft, puppets, and more. Link
Everyone is familiar with the fact that grades in American colleges and universities are prone to “inflation” over time, but the data are much more striking when presented as a graph.
We’ve looked at contemporary grades from over 160 colleges and universities in the United States with a combined enrollment of over 2,000,000 students and historical grades from over 80 schools… The rise in grades in the 1960s correlates with the social upheavals of the Vietnam War. It was followed by a decade period of static to falling grades. The cause of the renewal of grade inflation, which began in the 1980s and has yet to end, is subject to debate, but it is difficult to ascribe this rise in grades to increases in student achievement.
In a companion piece, the authors discuss these trends in detail, compare the sciences to the humanities, and note that the same trend is not evident in community colleges. Of particular interest are links to the data from over 200 colleges and universities. At my college the GPA was 2.7 in the mid-1960s, and is now nearly 3.5.
Link.
