Blogs

I was asked by some colleagues if I could recommend any web based and/or mobile collaborative platforms for virtual teams. The requirements include the need to manage and track projects, share and collaboratively author and edit documents, and engage in virtual meetings.

At the last school board meeting there were two distinct discussions, both excellent. The first, not surprisingly after the tragedy in Connecticut, dealt with school security and the second dealt with an early exposure world languages program.

With due consideration and appreciation to all players in the knowledge and discourse domain, universities remain the sole credible bastions of critical inquiry, though they remain largely overlooked and their potential poorly tapped. To be more direct, knowledge, innovation and discourse generated and developed by African universities, albeit meager, remain largely underutilized, and worse, often ignored.

Last Friday, Ben called me at work. I answered with some trepidation, because 1) he knows not to call me during supervision hours unless it is an emergency, and 2) he never calls, only texts.

Well, it’s like ballet.

I am a sociologist. I teach some of those courses that many academics wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. One such course is Sex, Gender, and Society. I also teach other courses or segments of other courses that deal with sexuality, globalization, imperialism, wars, religion, sweatshops. These are all difficult courses and topics to teach. Many of my colleagues think I am a glutton for punishment for wanting to teach these courses (if these weren’t enough I just added Sociology of the Body and Embodiment to the list of courses I teach).

The academic job market is a journey. A long, complex, stressful journey. I'm in the thick of this journey right now, having just arrived back from the Modern Language Association annual conference, where hundreds of scholarly hopefuls in English studies interviewed with search committees from universities all over the United States. Generally, the next step after a phone interview is a campus visit, wherein you travel to the interested university, interact with the faculty, staff and students, give a job talk, and possibly do a teaching demonstration. What follows is a bit of advice from my job mentors about what to expect during the campus visit, and what strategies you can use to be successful during it.

The book is out, and shipping! ----- Fearless prediction time: The City College of San Francisco will get some sort...