One of the most consistent email/news habits of my everydays is that I go through the Daily Update message from Inside Higher Ed, the free Web publication about higher education. I have been doing this for a few years now so I tend to assume that even if not everyone in academia reads IHE as religiously as I do, certainly everybody knows about it. Not true though, it turns out, based on several experiences, and thus this blog post. Although I’ve often linked to articles in it, they just did a major redesign of the site with some added features so I thought it was a good time to mention it again.

IHE is sort of like the Chronicle of Higher Education (which most people in academia do know about), but it’s fully free and much more user friendly. I used to read the Chronicle in graduate school and then even signed up for a paid subscription when I became a faculty member. However, as tends to be the case, I almost never visit Web sites that don’t let me set my own username. Moreover, back then, the Chronicle insisted on sending out a hard-copy of the publication. Worse, it was always in a plastic bag so recycling wasn’t a simple movement from mailbox to recycling bin, rather, it required dealing with the plastic packaging. Finally, and especially relevant to bloggers, it was complicated to link to articles in the Chronicle, because many required subscription and login, although it wasn’t always clear which ones. The Chronicle may have improved some of its services since, but it doesn’t really matter to me anymore, because in the meantime I’ve completely switched over to IHE. (This is not to say that I don’t read articles in the Chronicle anymore. I do if someone points me to one, but I don’t check its contents regularly.)

If you haven’t yet, go check out Inside Higher Ed. I’ve found their daily emails especially helpful in staying in touch with what’s going on in higher education. New features include advice columns as well as easier ways of sharing individual articles through various online services.

For those curious, I have no particular affiliation with IHE other than having published a piece on email communication there once a few years ago. I’ve met editor and co-founder Scott Jaschik a few times at conferences, he’s full of great ideas and very open to feedback about the publication.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 23rd, 2009 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Academia, General update. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.