Blogs

A little over a year and a half ago, I wrote a post describing how I was finally going to get rid of my collection of Canadian Literature (and corresponding critical materials). In it, I lamented how I would never use or read the books ever again (or even for the first time). It was time, I declared, to let go of the past, who I was professionally, and embrace who I was becoming. How things have changed in a short 18 months.

Are many people still in the throes of anti-Microsoft views, now long in the tooth of Internet time? Are many still swimming in the miasma of Google glory? Or do they know something about the negotiations that higher education has had with both of these companies over the last many years that I don't know?

Last week I had a passing conversation with a counterpart from another, more rural, part of my state. She mentioned that the big political issue on her campus is trying to get some sort of mobile broadband coverage on campus. None of the big four telecoms -- soon to become three, I’m guessing -- want to be bothered, since the population density just isn’t there, and the area isn’t terribly affluent. The students and faculty are increasingly upset, since mobile devices are all the rage now, but mobile devices without internet access are basically paperweights.

The promise of "badges" and other new forms of credentialing is that they'll help give a boost to those who do not have college diplomas or other forms of official recognition for their skills or knowledge. But will badges and the like really be able to live up to that promise?

As an undergraduate I had a wardrobe consisting of state university sweat pants, hoodies, flip-flops and free t-shirts. And why not? It was comfortable, easy, and everyone else dressed that way. However, when I got to graduate school I realized that my undergrad wardrobe was not going to cut it. There was no formal dress code, but it was clear by looking at my peers and professors that I needed to step up how I dressed in order to both fit in and be taken seriously. It is important to dress the part as graduate school is where we really begin our careers as scientists and start to interact with members of our field. Thankfully though, day-to-day academia can also be rather casual and there are many options for dressing.

Have you ever had an A/V (audio / visual) failure during a conference presentation? You are all ready to go with your talk and the projector will not work, the slides will not load, the audio is on the blink, your multimedia refuses to play?

A guest post with some good news; there is hope.

Sometimes the best way to tell what’s occupying me is to see the open tabs in my browser. I just closed eight that had to do with the recent Atlantic piece by Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All.” The responses I’ve been interested in focus mostly on what it might mean to “have it all” rather than taking up the well-trodden “mommy wars” positions that have become so predictable as to be boring. Perhaps the furthest from Slaughter’s original piece is Tim Kreider’s “The Busy Trap,” a lovely paean to what he calls laziness, but may simply be sustainable living.