Are you looking to increase the use of social media in your classroom to improve your student's learning? You might want to listen to a podcast by Lisa Chamberlin. Creating an Online Course of Substance Faculty Learning Community has set an ambitious set of outcomes. They continue to meet, most recently to hear a stellar presentation by our own Dr. Kaye Shelton who gave us a blueprint for creating an online course. Drs. Nancy Blume and Cheng-Hsien Lin are facilitating this very active FLC. The outcomes for all four FLC will be presented in a showcase this coming May. Watch this blog for more information. There is considerable unrest in the academic world judging from headlines in two major higher education publications. First, the Elsevier boycott continues to expand. About 2,400 scholars have put their names to an online pledge not to publish or do any editorial work for the company's journals, including refereeing papers. Protesters say Elsevier is emblematic of an abusive publishing industry. "The government pays me and other scientists to produce work, and we give it away to private entities," says Brett S. Abrahams, an assistant professor of genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. "Then they charge us to read it." Mr. Abrahams signed the pledge on Tuesday after reading about it on Facebook. "Over the past 10 years, our prices have been in the lowest quartile in the publishing industry," said Alicia Wise, Elsevier's director of universal access. "Last year our prices were lower than our competitors'. I'm not sure why we are the focus of this boycott, but I'm very concerned about one dissatisfied scientist, and I'm concerned about 2,000." Then there is the recent summit held for those employed as adjunct faculty. Members of the New Faculty Majority, a group representing professors off the tenure track, say that "contingent" employment is problematic and exploitative. The statistics now indicate that non-tenure-track faculty, including part-timers, make up about 73 percent of the academic workforce. Leaders of the New Faculty Majority offered up a draft document laying out the goals and principles of what it hopes will be a broad-based effort by key players in higher education to improve adjuncts' lot. Intended to secure contingent faculty members better pay and benefits, more job security, a greater role in college governance, and assurances of academic freedom, the document calls for colleges to undertake sweeping efforts to improve adjuncts' working conditions, and for the adjuncts themselves to play a key role in guiding such change.