Blogs

Incivility has no place within college communities. It sucks the joy out of academic departments, provides an awful example for our students, and impedes honest face-to-face discussion of real issues. We should call incivility what it is – at the minimum, a breach of community, and at its worst, bullying.

My state is starting to make noises about basing appropriations for public colleges on “performance” numbers. Since it’s fairly clear that we’re talking about reallocating existing money, rather than adding new money to the pot, some campuses stand to get more, and others stand to get less.

The American Historical Association recently came out with a cautious statement about open access to humanities scholarship. I concur with their concerns about the recommendations made in the Finch Report. That report, the fruits of a UK government task force that included government officials, scientists, and publishers, more or less argues two things: publicly-funded research results should be accessible to all and, in order to create a model to accomplish that, publishers’ expenses should be covered by authors and their proxies, not by readers and their proxies. It’s a great recipe for sustaining publishing corporations. It is not a particularly good way of making research accessible. After all, the publishers who make the highest profits got us into an unsustainable situation. Why should the solution be designed to keep their revenue streams flowing with public dollars?

Our students want to interact with their courses on mobile devices. The problem is that we have built our online platforms mostly around the browser. The LMS providers are all putting out mobile apps, but so far I have found that these apps offer a poor experience compared to the browser.

This past weekend I went to the regional tournament for the senior Olympic basketball games in Springfield, Illinois. My partner, Ted Hardin, is turning 50 this year, which makes him eligible to play. Teams from Chicago, Evanston and St. Louis showed up at a spacious Gold’s Gym to play in 3-on-3 tournaments. A fascinating group of players, including a federal judge in her mid-60s, participated.

In December of 2010, I copied all of the text from every blog post that I had ever written for Inside Higher Ed into a text file. The document represented six months worth of entries and I recall that it took a fair amount of time to put it together. My goal in doing this exercise was to create a word cloud using Wordle.net that I could use as the header graphic for my "six month anniversary" post. The word cloud, with a few formatting tweaks (font, color, layout) in Wordle, turned out to be a nice summary of the most-used words in my posts. In fact, this particular word cloud has turned up all over the web as it seems to be a popular Student Affairs themed graphic.

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to travel to Lithuania to work with the ISM University of Management and Economics on thinking through strategy and how they compete in the global market for management education.

Colleague: Hey, I heard that you completed [insert task] (comps, proposal, thesis dissertation document)! You: Yes, it feels great it out of the way! Colleague: I bet. So now you just need to [insert next daunting task] (do your proposal, write your dissertation, find a job). You: *glass shatters*.... yeah, thanks for reminding me.