Blogs

My brother and I have always dealt with relaxation in very different ways. We're both graduate students, him in his second year, and me in my fifth year. When we visited my parents for breaks like Thanksgiving and the Winter holidays during undergrad, we had extremely different reactions to the free time. He read books, had extended lounging sessions on the couch, and would watch entire seasons of popular tv shows. I filled my time with friends, got back into my exercise routine, and was continually out and about. These methods had been fairly successful for us, even though they were different.

I was talking to an administrative director at Greenback recently. He's a pretty good guy, and he wants to help the U out with the "whole sustainability thing", but to his mind a large portion of that boils down to "recycle more". What I really wanted to say was "no, recycle less! Recycling more is the least good of the non-bad options!" It would just have confused (and probably irritated him), so I held back.

Incivility has no place within college communities. It sucks the joy out of academic departments, provides an awful example for our students, and impedes honest face-to-face discussion of real issues. We should call incivility what it is – at the minimum, a breach of community, and at its worst, bullying.

My state is starting to make noises about basing appropriations for public colleges on “performance” numbers. Since it’s fairly clear that we’re talking about reallocating existing money, rather than adding new money to the pot, some campuses stand to get more, and others stand to get less.

The American Historical Association recently came out with a cautious statement about open access to humanities scholarship. I concur with their concerns about the recommendations made in the Finch Report. That report, the fruits of a UK government task force that included government officials, scientists, and publishers, more or less argues two things: publicly-funded research results should be accessible to all and, in order to create a model to accomplish that, publishers’ expenses should be covered by authors and their proxies, not by readers and their proxies. It’s a great recipe for sustaining publishing corporations. It is not a particularly good way of making research accessible. After all, the publishers who make the highest profits got us into an unsustainable situation. Why should the solution be designed to keep their revenue streams flowing with public dollars?

Our students want to interact with their courses on mobile devices. The problem is that we have built our online platforms mostly around the browser. The LMS providers are all putting out mobile apps, but so far I have found that these apps offer a poor experience compared to the browser.

This past weekend I went to the regional tournament for the senior Olympic basketball games in Springfield, Illinois. My partner, Ted Hardin, is turning 50 this year, which makes him eligible to play. Teams from Chicago, Evanston and St. Louis showed up at a spacious Gold’s Gym to play in 3-on-3 tournaments. A fascinating group of players, including a federal judge in her mid-60s, participated.

In December of 2010, I copied all of the text from every blog post that I had ever written for Inside Higher Ed into a text file. The document represented six months worth of entries and I recall that it took a fair amount of time to put it together. My goal in doing this exercise was to create a word cloud using Wordle.net that I could use as the header graphic for my "six month anniversary" post. The word cloud, with a few formatting tweaks (font, color, layout) in Wordle, turned out to be a nice summary of the most-used words in my posts. In fact, this particular word cloud has turned up all over the web as it seems to be a popular Student Affairs themed graphic.