Blogs

I am not one of those people who looks down on technology in general, or the internet in particular, because of what it has taken away from us, like enjoying nature, being with family and friends, and reading actual books. I still try to do these “natural” things (as opposed to the artificial cyber world) that are part of life, but I must admit that I love technology. I acknowledge that using technologies has now become an essential part of life as well.

From the “other duties as assigned” file: yesterday I had to go in for a medical procedure. In the course of making small talk with the tech, she mentioned that her daughter is looking at colleges, but they’re both worried about student loans. I mentioned where I work, and for the next half hour, the conversation was all about transfer, comparative tuition levels, student loans, and the difficulty for new grads who can’t find jobs but have huge loans to pay off. All of this during the procedure.

Research is a creative activity. In essence, to solve your research question, you will need to take a step outside of the boundaries of the current knowledge. If you are expected to develop a new theory as part of your research, you certainly need to get your creative juices flowing.

Karen Symms Gallagher, Dean of USC Rossier School of Education, caught my eye for two reasons. First, I read a couple of opinion pieces in which she argued that we need to look beyond MOOCs to the potential of providing extremely high quality and intimate for-credit degree programs that leverage new options in technology and new opportunities in non-profit / for-profit partnerships. These columns, including Higher Ed Leaders Must Lead Online and Rethinking Higher Ed Open Online Learning stand apart for their combination of a progressive call for innovation in online education and skepticism that the locus of this innovation is limited to the world of MOOCs.

That is the name of the White House's press release about an executive order that President Obama signed yesterday.

As Labor Economics was one of my fields in graduate school, I always look at any hiring process with special interest. I therefore was intrigued at the new job opening I learned of Monday, with the news that our current Pope is resigning.

I have a new office this semester.

From time to time, I rant about sustainability explicitly from the point of view of a farmer. That's because I believe that farmers -- more and more unlike the majority of folks in North America -- experience and interact with the biosphere directly. Which is not to say that we always gain great wisdom from, and exercise exquisite stewardship in, those interactions of course. But even our most ineffective (or negatively effective) interactions are -- as a result of direct physical involvement -- informed by a wider range of considerations and potential understanding than could possibly be conveyed in a YouTube video. Or a textbook. Or a lecture.