Blogs

My daughter Katie turned seventeen this week and we celebrated by eating, shopping, going to spin classes, eating more and listening to Casey Crescenzo of the Dear Hunter in concert in Chicago. Katie is the child who worries about her grades, studies a lot and rarely parties, but that night she looked radiant in her new sundress, flushed with her excitement about

More and more, I think the job of teaching is to help students see what we do in our disciplines, not what we know.

We have teaching evaluations to measure how students perceive faculty, grades to measure student success in the classroom, number of applicants, yield rate and (sometimes) retention to measure admissions, and fundraising/participation to measure success in development. But how do you measure success in student affairs?

It all started when Dave Newport at UC-Boulder (I think it was Dave, but looking back I can't find the specifics) said good things about the book "Understanding the Social Dimension of Sustainability."

A few thoughts (and lingering questions) about Coursera's news today.

Academics of my generation probably harbor bitter memories of the mythical “great wave of retirements” that was going to open up all those faculty jobs. Apparently, in Illinois, that wave is finally happening. It’s driven by pension panic, rather than by normal demographic change, but a wave is a wave.

Andrew Blum takes the name of his great book on the physical Internet, the Internet infrastructure, from Senator Ted Stevens' famous quote.

During the extravaganza known as Blackboard World, I was asked to share "the best piece of advice that a teacher ever gave me." Pondering the question for a moment, my thoughts turned to someone who I've always thought of as my favorite teacher. To most people, his name was Clyde. For me, he'll always be known as Grandpa. My grandfather didn't go to a fancy college. His traditional education was limited in that he didn't graduate from high school. However, as the son of German immigrants who farmed land in Iowa, his learning was largely experiential. His financial acumen, knowledge of machinery, and wisdom were generated via decades of hands-on experience.