Blogs

It's a digital world, and I'm a digital girl. Well, sometimes. I use my Google calendar to remind me of every single event crammed into my days, my Dropbox account has all of my data and writing backed up so I can access it at any moment, I read off a Kindle before I go to sleep, and my phone pretty much runs my life from the moment the alarm goes off to the minute that I put it on silent for bedtime. Despite the fact that I tote my laptop with me everywhere and have thousands of PDFs and word documents for all my courses and research, I really like paper.

The kids (and TW) had a snow day earlier this week, so she took them sledding. At one point, when she was standing on a sled, the sled went one way and she went another, with her knee sort of splitting the difference.

What is the last book you passed around to your direct reports or your larger organization? A book that you thought was worth the time for your colleagues to read, worth the investment of paying for the book, and worth the time for everyone to discuss? A book that you thought would help get everyone on the same page, challenge current thinking, and inspire your team?

Our post on “What Surprised You When You First Started Working in Higher Education” (the results of our brief survey) generated a fair number of emails and tweets about the politics in higher education, so we thought we would look into this area a bit more for today’s post.

In Economics we talk about maximizing “utility” subject to a given constraint. For example, a shopper wants to choose the best combination of groceries that can be purchased given their present budget. I thought of this recently, as I recalled a class I fell into in my last days of college. Realizing that tuition had been paid that allowed me to take up to eighteen credits my last semester, and also assuming that I would never again have access to courses in Theology or Philosophy, I decided to take as many of those classes as I could before graduating.

I'm still struggling with whether (how) the teaching power of stories can be used to change people's beliefs and expectations about sustainability. However, in the process of the research which is part of pretty much any struggle I undertake, I came upon a two-sentence passage that's simply too close to perfect not to share. In a heartbeat, it conveys the essence of what a successful story-telling strategem must accomplish -- not how to do it by any means, but how to tell if it's been successful.

Lots of people enabled Lance Armstrong's lies. Why not hear why they believed him?

American Career Institutes, a for-profit higher ed chain that specialized in computer-based career-oriented majors, just closed abruptly. It had campuses in Maryland and Massachusetts, including one in Springfield, which is HCC’s largest feeder city.