Blogs

I am writing this week from Faculty College – a week-long teaching retreat where faculty from each of the University of Wisconsin colleges and universities gather to discuss teaching challenges, innovative techniques, and the latest research on how students learn. It is hosted by a small college in the heart of central Wisconsin, a place of quiet beauty. I first attended as a brand-new assistant professor eleven years ago and found it an incredibly valuable, affirming, even transformative experience. However, I missed a few years after my daughter was born.

In higher education, do we offer consistent customer service across all of our communications channels?

Broad-brush rules have a way of generating unintended, and even unsupportable, consequences. Most of us know that intuitively when we talk about things like mandatory minimum sentencing, “zero tolerance” policies, or tax loopholes.

I flew, it blew, I come up with analogies.

I teach a course in the spring called Information Fluency (rather a lame title, but I was suffering from lack of creativity when I submitted the course proposal years ago; maybe I should hold a “name this course” contest). It’s an upper division undergraduate course pitched to students who are planning to go to graduate school, giving them a chance to learn more about the way the literature of their field works as well as generally how to use library and internet tools for research. One of their assignments is to interview a researcher in their field.

When three of my students approached me a couple of months ago to participate in a TEDx event, I balked. The students sent me a very well-organized folder with information about TED, some of the speakers already lined up, links to their favorite TED talks and then they set up a meeting with me. The event was in the middle of April. As many academics know, April is not a good month for us. The semester, at least for me, picks up like a roller coaster and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down for the end.

Google has (finally) announced the next generation Chromebook, with updated hardware and a new Chrome OS.

As Peter Drucker once said, “The customer rarely buys what the business thinks it sells him.”