Blogs

What edtech conferences do you attend? My list has included EDUCAUSE, ELI, ELI Learning Technology Leadership, ECAR Symposiums, BbWorld, various NERCOMP events, and a growing number of gatherings contiguous to our edtech ecosystem. So far I have not been to a Sloan-C event or an NMC conference, and I hope to make it out to InstructureCon one of these days.

In a typical year, I attend one Hofstra commencement ceremony in December and four during May. The May commencement exercises have individual ceremonies for undergraduate, graduate, Law, and an Honors Convocation while the December ceremony has all of the above for midyear graduates. Only one of our May ceremonies, the undergraduate ceremony, has been held outdoors regularly and for this year’s ceremony, the weather was perfect. Not too hot, not too cold, nice breeze, not raining, no thunder and lightning. For an outdoor ceremony, you could not have had better weather. And yet, within two weeks of this year’s ceremony we made a decision that going forward the undergraduate ceremony would be divided by colleges and schools into two separate ceremonies and would be held indoors in our comfortable air-conditioned arena.

Sometimes things change really quickly, forcing you to re-evaluate everything.

Sometimes we don't learn anything from our failures.

I had many strong reactions to Louis J. Freeh's finding that Penn State officials had been active in covering up Jerry Sandusky's ongoing abuse of young boys. Unfortunately, surprise was not one of them.

What’s New at UVenus: Denise Horn at University of Venus with Academic stress: reaching the end of an unbalanced semester...

If you’re a U.S. academic, you are likely about halfway through the summer break by now. Many are technically not on break, as you may (like me) have a 12-month appointment or be teaching in the summer. Nonetheless, for the majority the pace of everyday life in academia slows down with fewer students and faculty around in the summer. This slower pace means more time for research or other summer projects -- but can also contribute to a lack of motivation (for example, as an extrovert, I find it difficult to keep myself motivated in the summer since I have much less contact with people).

A recent series of three blog posts by Kathleen Fitzpatrick chimed nicely with two things I am thinking about these days: how scholars can best share their ideas in a digital age (and what the decisions scholars make will mean for libraries as we rejigger positions and allocate resources) and how I’m going to pull off a conference we’re holding this October on Nordic women crime writers. Event planning is not in my skill set (hey, my idea of a perfect wedding is eloping), but I’m really excited about putting readers, writers, and scholars together to see what happens.