Filter & Sort
A Lesson of Letting Go
A few years ago, I was walking down the streets of my hometown trying to picture places of my childhood to make an archive. When I came in front of the house I lived in as a child and compared my life then and now, I asked myself the question: “How the hell did you get to where you are, Itır?”
Ask the Administrator: Where Did My Class Go?
A regular correspondent asks about not getting the teaching assignment that had been expected.
Opening Ceremonies
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.
Parsing the NYTimes Coverage of the Growth of MOOCs
On 7/17 the NYTimes published an analysis piece by Richard Perez-Pena headlined "Top Universities Test the Online Appeal of Free".
Pondering the Fallacy of the Thread
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.
More on the Economic Myth of “Choice”
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.”
Long Distance Mom: Seventeen and Having It All
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
What We Do, Not What We Know
More and more, I think the job of teaching is to help students see what we do in our disciplines, not what we know.