Blogs

My initial response to an invitation to review the new Livescribe Sky wifi smartpen began with a polite rejection: "Thanks for the email. I have to be honest, I'm just not that interested in this technology." The reason for my pushback was that I am already fairly entrenched in my note-taking habits. A classic Moleskine with a Uni-Ball Signo is my preferred method for jotting down ideas, notes, etc. When I'm sans paper and pen, I tend to use my iPad with a Bamboo stylus and either Paper (by FiftyThree) or the Bamboo Paper app. I outlined this to a very nice public relations rep. Undeterred, she informed me that the new smartpen allows notes to be automatically synced (via wifi) to Evernote which makes them readily available on tablets and smartphones.

Guest contributor Steve Davenport, Associate Director of the Creative Writing Program at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, counts the ways he and his dissertation got to know each other.

What might a water well used traditionally in rural Spain teach us about how to make the most of MOOCs?

I will not be using this tool because I don’t care if my students read the materials assigned in class.

I get uneasy when I read calls for ‘transformative leaders.’ They strike me as taking far too much for granted.

Markdown, a text formatting syntax designed for easy readability but also transformability, gets a lot of love from geeks. Lincoln Mullen has written a great introduction to Markdown for Profhacker if you are unfamiliar with the syntax. My big question when I made the shift away from traditional word processors and began using plaintext and markdown was if it would be flexible enough to support the conventions of scholarly work.

Moretti's The New Geography of Jobs is the perfect companion to Bill Bishop's fine book The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart. Where Bishop talks about the social and cultural impact of the geographic clustering by education and skills, Moretti explains the economic outcomes of this trend.

Academics, mainly those from the domain of human sciences, do not like to be reminded too much about various economic and business-like terms. However, some business models and ideas from the world of economics will help not only greatly improve the financial situation, but will also give a new impetus to the quality of the academic work as such.