Blogs

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.

Life is a series of choices. But the choices we make are dictated by factors that are largely outside of our control; our choices are dictated by others’ choices and other circumstances that surround us. In both the debates about exploitation in academia and even within the feminist movement, the common refrain used to refute any complaints is that, “you have a choice” or “you made the choice, now live with it.”

My daughter Katie turned seventeen this week and we celebrated by eating, shopping, going to spin classes, eating more and listening to Casey Crescenzo of the Dear Hunter in concert in Chicago. Katie is the child who worries about her grades, studies a lot and rarely parties, but that night she looked radiant in her new sundress, flushed with her excitement about

More and more, I think the job of teaching is to help students see what we do in our disciplines, not what we know.

We have teaching evaluations to measure how students perceive faculty, grades to measure student success in the classroom, number of applicants, yield rate and (sometimes) retention to measure admissions, and fundraising/participation to measure success in development. But how do you measure success in student affairs?

It all started when Dave Newport at UC-Boulder (I think it was Dave, but looking back I can't find the specifics) said good things about the book "Understanding the Social Dimension of Sustainability."