Blogs

I'm spent. Here's some creative non-fiction instead.

Before I started blogging I never really spent time with people that work in public relations (PR).

At the last Board of Education meeting, in addition to dealing with the critical issue of security, we also continued our discussion of FLES — the teaching of language at the elementary school level as well as our discussion of a world languages orientation. Often, at the college level, students look to minimize their course work in foreign languages. But in a global environment, where English is not the only world language, such an orientation is clearly short sighted.

“Mom, take a video of me and put it up on Facebook!” My five-year-old daughter is a (relative) wiz with technology. She was using my iPhone with ease before she was even 18 months old, playing memory games, shape puzzles, and phonic lessons. Both she and her younger brother have our old iPhones for when we travel (said one nine-year-old to his mom when I took them out on one trip: “THEY have iPhones!”). She loves to take pictures with her phone, and complains bitterly that she can’t also take video. The two kids are used to interacting with screens, so to speak, as they regularly skype with their grandparents and other extended family members. We use Facebook to share pictures, videos, and funny stories about our family life with family and friends, most of whom live far away from us.

The National Bureau of Economic Research published the “College as Country Club” paper last week. It has gotten a lot of coverage already by IHE, the Chronicle of Higher Education, TIME, the Wall Street Journal, and Freakonomics.

This week, as I was starting to feel myself again after an intense bout of the flu, Ben came down with it. I had a comparatively light work week, so even when he wasn't that sick I was able to spend time with him, watching TV, talking when he felt up to it, and making tea, the closest thing to food he could tolerate for a few days.

Borrowing from Ta-Nehisi Coates, I'm looking for help understanding this phenomenon as it pertains to higher ed.

This month, students in my January course have been reading about books and culture. This week, as we’re wrapping things up, they speculated about what the world of books might look like in ten years, and came up with some intriguing scenarios and proposals. As I left the building where the class meets I chatted with some humanities faculty and mentioned what we’d been talking about. They seemed at first apprehensive, then surprised and relieved that students predicted a future for books.