Blogs

As I rolled into work on Monday, I was greeted by a friend from the Chemistry department rushing out of the building. She frantically told me that there had been a shooting at her daughter’s school. She said that five students had been shot, that she was off to see if her daughter was ok, and to please pass the word on to her department chair. She was off before I could give her a hug, but the scene haunted me all day as more bits of information became available and the story grew more horrible.

What’s New at UVenus: ● UVenus at the Guardian - Janine Utell - To Manage or Lead? Applying management theory...

Dave Newport (UC-Boulder) posted to his blog at ridiculous-o'clock this morning, reiterating his perception that a key reason environmentalism hasn't had much effect is that it's given its social justice component short shrift. Dave's point is valid, but I see it as merely one example of something Naomi Klein comments on in a recent interview in the journal Solutions.

Late Nite Labs is a startup that offers schools Web-based science labs. Can this type of virtual lab replace the offline version? And can a more accessible, and perhaps even more imaginative, lab help keep students engaged in science classes and STEM majors?

Has your college found a reasonably elegant way to handle grades of “incomplete?”

We had some very interesting discussions in our Strategy and Competition in Higher Education class last night about "substitutes" for higher education and and whether they will become more attractive as the cost of obtaining a degree continues to rise and new alternative products and services emerge.

This blog is called "Technology and Learning" - but maybe the word "Books" should also appear in the title. I write about books because I live so much in my head, and the books that I read form the mental scaffolding of my life. Some people learn by doing, I learn by reading (and writing). And I want to hang out with other readers. I want to know what other people who live their lives at the intersection of education and technology are reading. I want to read the same books as you, and spend time talking about what we are reading together.

All my life, I've been an extreme introvert. A thoughtful, quiet child, I was continually told by strangers to “Smile!” At the beginning of graduate school I scored 98% introversion on the Meyers-Briggs test. A vocational test in high school suggested that I was temperamentally suited to be a sculptor.