Blogs

I'm calling it. The age of software training is dead. We should never purchase another application or platform for our campus that requires any workshops, documentation, FAQs, or dedicated support people. If software is not intuitive and simple enough for people to teach themselves to use it then that software is flawed.

We like to joke in economics that we economists seem to always have two hands. We are known for saying “on the one hand” and then explaining some policy implication, only to follow quickly with “on the other hand”, followed by a conflicting policy implication. I found myself thinking of this recently while on vacation as I debated the merits and costs of possibly buying a laptop computer or a tablet.

When I first got professionally involved with campus sustainability, there was really only one first principle: greenhouse gas emissions are causing global warming, and the higher education sector needed to show America how to correct that. Call it First Principles v1.0.

July being July, meetings take on a different tone than they have during the rest of the year.

Earlier this school year I wrote about mentoring as part of my mandate for the year, and now that my school year is ending I have time to reflect on how this worked for me and my students. I work with lots of students. In previous years the number was close to 1200 students per year. This last year, I had a teaching release and taught more than 900 students. I am also an Undergraduate Advisor, which means that students can potentially get lots of face time with me.

What would happen if the academic IT Department became the academic Collaboration Department?

I did not know what to expect at the “Sustainability Across the Curriculum Leadership Workshop” I attended last week at...

A little over a year and a half ago, I wrote a post describing how I was finally going to get rid of my collection of Canadian Literature (and corresponding critical materials). In it, I lamented how I would never use or read the books ever again (or even for the first time). It was time, I declared, to let go of the past, who I was professionally, and embrace who I was becoming. How things have changed in a short 18 months.