Blogs

I read with interest that the City College of San Francisco may need “special” trustees to come in and right the ship. Folks who’ve been following the development of “emergency fiscal managers” in Michigan, or even the municipal bankruptcies in California, will have a sense of deja vu.

TED released a new TedBooks iOS app this week. The app is free, the books are $2.99 and are built on the Atavist platform. The text is accompanied by videos, images, links, and in some cases audio narration.

When I teach sampling in my statistics classes, I often talk about the role that Ohio has traditionally played in determining the outcome of presidential races. This was something that I was blissfully unaware of growing up on the East Coast, where I was led to believe that anything that mattered in the country happened east of the Hudson River. Now that I live in Ohio, I realize that my adopted state has often played an important role in determining the final outcomes of presidential races, and that this year’s race promises to be no different. Indeed, those of us who live in Ohio cannot turn on the radio or TV these days without encountering ads from both sides of the isle. This is particularly annoying to those of us who tend to watch or listen to the news, as such programs are where political ads are being concentrated at this point in the race.

A few years ago, I was walking down the streets of my hometown trying to picture places of my childhood to make an archive. When I came in front of the house I lived in as a child and compared my life then and now, I asked myself the question: “How the hell did you get to where you are, Itır?”

A regular correspondent asks about not getting the teaching assignment that had been expected.

A lot has changed since I first started working at the Little College on the Prairie. When I arrived, one of my first tasks was to explain to the community how to use the online catalog, which arrived a month or two before I did. Searching then involved typing commands into one of a handful of terminals that were surrounded by the card catalog that we weren’t quite ready to dispose of. A few years later, we were able to search for articles through those terminals with their beady yellow characters. The library filled with the chatter of dot matrix printers.

On 7/17 the NYTimes published an analysis piece by Richard Perez-Pena headlined "Top Universities Test the Online Appeal of Free".

There are moments with this blog that feel an awful lot like that scene in The Matrix where Neo experiences deja vu. While I can't do a proper "whoa" like Keanu Reeves, I should at least acknowledge the endless thread that I am always thinking about: "Where does Student Affairs learn about technology…at least from the formal sense?" Having been through a Student Affairs masters-level graduate program, and chatted with countless other SA grads, I am uncertain as to where our knowledge of technology springs forth.