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Creating safe space to fail and be fearless for my kids. How can we create those same space in higher education?

It’s still too early in the semester for my students to have handed anything in for me to grade, but at the point where lectures are still pretty rote. I finished revising a paper this week, resubmitted, and realized I don’t have any other looming deadlines that desperately need to be met. While there are always thing that can be done, there was nothing pressing that needed doing.

This morning, I happened to hear a story on NPR about peer-to-peer car-sharing. Folks (those mentioned in the story were university students) become members of an organization. Some join to be able to rent privately-owned cars on an hourly basis, others to make their personal vehicles available in return for up to 60% of rental fees. The central organization (company) takes care of member screening (for credit-worthiness, a clean driving record, etc.) and all the administrative overhead.

Here is where law, policy and technology get interesting: When can a government entity shut down service in the name of social order? Some might raise the bar of the question and ask: Should a government entity have the ability to shut down a communication service? If so, what is the "test," i.e. under what circumstances? The inquiry gets even better: Who gets to the define and set the bar?

Go to enough panels, and you start to detect themes.

Today I attended my first unconference, a one-day event put on by NERCOMP on the learning management system (LMS).

I revise and extend my pre-conference complaints.

Today is the first day of my spring break. The day began at 5:45 am with a call from the local school system to tell us that there would be a 2-hour delay in school opening due to “predicted inclement weather.” I put the phone down, told my husband what was up, and tried to overcome the adrenaline that an early-morning phone call always elicits and get back to sleep—then realized that the call had come from my son’s former school system, not the one he’s in now. I was pretty fully awake by then, so I got up to check on his school—and saw the snow falling in large, lazy flakes, blanketing the cars but not, as far as I could see, the roads.