Blogs

I have a new office this semester.

From time to time, I rant about sustainability explicitly from the point of view of a farmer. That's because I believe that farmers -- more and more unlike the majority of folks in North America -- experience and interact with the biosphere directly. Which is not to say that we always gain great wisdom from, and exercise exquisite stewardship in, those interactions of course. But even our most ineffective (or negatively effective) interactions are -- as a result of direct physical involvement -- informed by a wider range of considerations and potential understanding than could possibly be conveyed in a YouTube video. Or a textbook. Or a lecture.

Yesterday I got a peek behind the curtain.

Sometimes you have to look at the bright side.

For the last two days UD has been in Washington DC, at a high-level gathering of federal government, Gates Foundation, and university people, all of whom convened to talk about how to use online technology to improve education for American students, from elementary to graduate school.

I’ve been a fan of Kevin Carey’s for some time. He gets a lot right, and even when he’s off, he’s interesting. This week he's true to form.

I'm a huge fan of what Drexel University Online has done in online learning. A recent example of Drexel’s leadership role in the development of online learning is its Gateway to Online Learning Scholarship, a program designed to allow an initial group of RN's to pursue a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN).

A colleague of mine from another college came back from a work/life balance seminar where the speaker focused on four different quadrants in which to divide work. Urgent, Important; Urgent, Unimportant; Not Urgent, Not Important; Not Urgent; Important. The speaker argued that too many people focus only on the first two areas, rightfully ignore the third, but also skip out on the fourth which may be the most important area to focus on. In actuality, my colleague was mocking the talk as yet another waste of his time. For me, though, I was hungry for any new (to me, at least) outlook. As the Chair of a large academic department at a small liberal arts college, an Associate Professor, and the mother of three young children (8, 6, and 4) juggling and prioritizing are a daily part of my life.