Blogs

If you’re in academia, chances are you’ve spent some time thinking about and discussing student writing. You may have found yourself enraged at something, or laughing out loud, running to share the hilarity with the nearest living being. Maybe you scribbled it down somewhere, or perhaps it seared itself into your brain and never needed to be written down.

I enjoyed this story. Apparently, Ozarks Technical Community College has decided to take out ads showing how its tuition levels stack up against its local for-profit competitors. The idea is to provide some much-needed counterpoint to the marketing barrage that for-profits routinely generate, and to warn students away from programs that might saddle them with heavy debt burdens and non-transferable credits.

I'm inclined to leave the technical aspects of online pedagogy and teaching tools to those who, like Zellner and Katherine O'Flaherty (whose piece on Blackboard you can read here), have greater experience and expertise than I. What I want to talk about here is whether or not online teaching makes sense for you as you strategize your trajectory through graduate school and into whatever professional future compels you. So this is not about how to do it better, this is about whether, as a graduate student, to do it at all. As with most questions you encounter in this business, there is no definitive answer—merely a disjointed collection of more questions and things to think about.

Don't even bother buying a PowerBall ticket for tonight's $425 million drawing. I've already purchased the winning ticket.

As of today we’ve lived in our new home, in our new city, for 85 days. (You can follow our move in my earlier blogs.) Our first month here flew by - everything was new, we tried different things. The second month also went fairly smoothly, as we started to live the new life with a bit more routine. But the third month has been a month of struggles.

End of semester grading is upon me.

When I get off Greenback's campus and into the surrounding community of Backboro, I often work with local government and grassroots organizations concerned with sustainability. The government groups, of course, are constituted within (and so inherently committed to) prevailing structures of governance.

I winced when I read about the Community College of Allegheny County telling its adjuncts that it would cap their hours in order to avoid penalties under the Affordable Care Act. The commentary over the next few days was predictable: conservatives saying “I told you so,” and everyone else saying that this is just another example of evil administrators running a college like a business.