To mark the occasion:

Two years to go!

• Syttende mai!
• Remembering Kenneth Waltz
• Erica Chenoweth and Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham put together a special issue of the Journal of Peace Research on nonviolence. (Free access through July 31).
• A New Deal for Fragile States:  spoiler alert — national leadership and ownership of agendas are key.
• In other IRS news — don’t F@#$ with adjuncts…
• 3-d printable drones in our future?
• Meanwhile, back in Syria: Could things get any worse?
• Michael Walzer sees dithering in Syria as an entirely rational response.
• Is the town of Qusayr next?
• Jon Lee Anderson on videos of atrocities in war.

and….

• KFC delivers to Gaza  – through tunnels.

Elsewhere, it’s not been a good week for the Obama Administration but good news for team O, the media agree that the Benghazi mess has been overblown:

• David Brooks on the scapegoating of State Department hand Victoria Neuland
• Jeffrey Goldberg concurs that Susan Rice was not to blame
• Read the emails for your self

In other news, personal health confessionals become something more:

• Actress Angelina Jolie on her double mastectomy after becoming aware of the BRCA gene and her high likelihood of developing the same cancer that killed her mother.
• Times contributor Andrew Revkin on how he has progressed since having a stroke 22 months ago

The father of modern IR theory Ken Waltz died this week if you were living in a cave without internet access

• Steve Walt’s remembrance
• Our own Duck liege Dan offered his own as well

Lots of bad news in Asia right now:

• China’s water crisis affecting its growth
• Cambodia shoe firm roof collapse
• Bangladesh, on top of the garment factory tragedy, is facing an imminent cyclone risk, a million evacuated

“Couples where the wife earns more than the husband are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce. Finally, based on time use surveys, the gender gap in non-market work is larger if the wife earns more than the husband” (abstract).

So, in a nutshell, women who earn more than their husbands get a whole bunch of bad stuff as a result: divorce and unhappiness, plus more time spent cleaning the toilet.  As a female academic who makes X times more than my public-school teacher spouse, I’m not sure what to make of this.[2]  The social science methods are commendable.  The conclusions seem to follow existing literature. It’s also consistent with advice great female scholars in the discipline have given me at various Women in Methodology and Women in Conflict Studies events. [3] Thankfully, I can’t really reconcile this with my own experiences either in my marriage or in the division of labor in my household.[4] I hope to remain an outlier.

I’ve mulled this over for a day or so and have come to the only conclusion that someone (a) with two little girls and (b) who studies advocacy and human rights can: I’m going to be a norm entrepreneur on this one. The new[5] norm I’m going to be promoting: real men can handle their spouse making more than them.  And, they can help clean the toilet.

Who’s with me?

Where this urgency comes from, however, might be less important than what it does to our sense of temporality, how experience and talk about the way we we are, right now, in “the MOOC moment.” In the MOOC moment, it seems to me, it’s already too late, always already too late. The world not only will change, but it has changed. In this sense, it’s isn’t simply that “MOOCs are the future,” or online education ischanging how we teach,” in the present tense. Those kinds of platitudes are chokingly [sic] omnipresent, but the interesting thing is the fact that the future is already now, that it has already changed how we teach. If you don’t get on the MOOC bandwagon, yesterday, you’ll have already been left behind. The world has already changed. To stop and question that fact is to be already belated, behind the times.

There’s a striking similarity between this kind of rhetoric and early globalization discourse. Indeed, one of the best ways to force change is to argue that the transformation is already happening.

I very much recommend reading the whole piece and not simply the excerpts I’ve culled from it. Bady does a much better — and more systematic — job than I did of linking together what Kohen calls “edutainment,” TED talks, and MOOCs. But among the many gems in the essay is this critical insight about MOOC discourse:

Things are moving so fast because if we stopped to think about what we are doing, we’d notice that MOOCs are both not the same thing as normal education, and are being positioned to replace “normal” education. But the pro-MOOC argument is always that it’s cheaper and almost never that it’s better; the most utopian MOOC-boosters will rarely claim that MOOCs are of equivalent educational value, and the most they’ll say is that someday it might be. This point is crucial to unpacking the hype: columnists, politicians, university administrators, educational entrepreneurs, and professors who are hoping to make their name by riding out this wave, they can all talk in such glowing terms about the onrushing future of higher education only because that future hasn’t actually happened yet: it’s still speculative in the sense that we’re all speculating about what it will look like. This means that the MOOC can be all things to all people because it is, literally, a speculation about what it might someday become.

I’ve often wondered about my own hostility to MOOC-talk. I’ve generally been a fairly early adopter of various technologies in an educational environment. I was one of the first professors to podcast lectures at Georgetown. I put up (mediocre) youtube lectures in 2008. I’ve been an evangelist in my field for public engagement via social media. So why am I not among the enthusiasts?

It might be that, like many academics, I stand to lose a lot from disruptive innovation. My line of work is one of the last to experience the relentless drive of late capitalism at the hands of business-consultant rent-seekers. My employer is prestigious, but not terribly financially secure. So perhaps the anti-professor rants that often show up on these threads have a point: I don’t want my cushy lifestyle to end. I’ll grant that this is some of it.

But the fundamental reason is, I think, that I’ve been there and done that. As Bady notes, there’s absolutely nothing new about MOOCs. Sure, the technology is better. We can record and post high-definition video relatively easily. Developers have created applications that reduce the effort needed to splice together a lecture and that allow for the relatively easy synching of various video and textual online resources. Moreover, decent online conferencing used to require dedicated equipment. Now we can do it — for free or a relatively small fee — through services such as Skype and Google Hangout.*

Still… none of that amounts to a game changer.

What I’ve found is that recorded lectures work best as supplements to ongoing courses. Most of the “thank you” notes I receive for the material I’ve put online bear this out. They tend to involve students who were having trouble understanding a particular topic, and needed to hear (or see) someone explain it in a different way. Now, one can construct a MOOC environment that does this well: combines the sage-on-stage with virtual discussion sections, online resources, and so forth. And there’s value to that. But your mileage will vary; the elements that make a MOOC seem of high quality might even be detrimental to educational outcomes.

By all means, add MOOCs to the arsenal of higher education. But don’t let  technofashionistas and op-ed columnists — let alone those who stand to earn a lot of money from expanded investment in MOOC infrastructure — convince you that a revolution is here. And, whatever else we do, we shouldn’t enable them to assist in dismantling a system that stands amongst the best in the world. Educational consultants, state legislators, and professional administrators are doing just fine with that on their own.

*Although my experience with Google Hangout is that each additional student online significantly increases the chance that connection failures, ambient noise, and other problems will disrupt the experience beyond repair.

The prize will be an award of $200 along with a plaque to honor the author’s work.

Books eligible for the award must fall into the broadly defined category of international ethics. This includes, but is not limited to, books on international descriptive ethics, international normative ethics, metaethics, comparative ethics, international religious ethics, international political theory, and international legal theory. Books not clearly falling into one of the above categories may be considered if members of the Selection Committee agree that it is worthy of consideration. Eligible books can be either single- or multi-authored. Edited collections will not be eligible. Textbooks, translations and memoirs are not eligible.  (Please see a list of past winners below.)

Authors can self-nominate if they so wish. Books must be received by the judges listed below by September 1, 2013. Books nominated will not be returned. Books to be considered must be published within a two year period preceding the year of the competition. This means that, to be considered for the 2014 prize, books must be published in either 2012 or 2013. ‘Published’ means that the year listed in the book itself must be one of these two. (Detailed regulations for the award shall be posted on the Section webpage and Facebook page.)

If you (or for publishers, your press) has published a book that falls within the time frame and the relevant subject matter category and you would like it considered for the prize, please send a copy of the book to each member of the committee, at the addresses listed below.

Kimberly Hutchings, Chair
Department of International Relations
LSE
Houghton St
London WC2A 2AE
UK

Luis Cabrera, Member
71 Watford Road
Birmingham
B30 1NP
UK

Harry D. Gould, Member
Department of Politics and IR
Florida International University
SIPA 423
11200 SW 8th St
Miami, FL 33199
USA

Past International Ethics Section Book Award Winners

2013. Alex J. Bellamy, Massacres and Morality: Mass Atrocities in an Age of Civilian Immunity. Oxford University Press, 2012.

2012. Bronwyn Leebaw, Judging State-Sponsored Violence, Imagining Political Change. Cambridge University Press, 2011.

2011. Walter F. Baber and Robert V. Bartlett, Global Democracy and Sustainable Jurisprudence: Deliberative Environmental Law. MIT Press, 2009.

2010. Tarik Kochi, The Other’s War: Recognition and the Violence of Ethics. Birkbeck Law Press, 2009.