Blogs

If you listen to the news coming out of New York and New Jersey these days, water is still on everybody's mind. Not water per se, perhaps. But certainly the long-lived impacts of water having been where no one particularly planned it to be. Places like tunnels and electrical substations and the first floors of houses. It seems that water is becoming an image, synecdochetic perhaps, for nature or the environment or the planet as a whole.

I got asked a great question yesterday: if you could just send one message to the public, what would it be?

Hearing that a new, stripped down product or service in your marketplace is “good enough” should strike fear the hearts of market leaders.

One chilly day in November, with a few morning hours surprisingly free of meetings or classes, I decided to stay home later into the day than usual due to what felt like an impending sinus infection (thereby putting the lie to all my fantasies of omnipotence). I lead a book discussion group on women's life writing at a local public library, and in honor of election season our selection this month was Janny Scott's A Singular Woman, the biography of Barack Obama's mother Stanley Ann Dunham.

Blackboard is at a critical point in the company's development. No longer in LMS or product acquisition mode. No longer public. No longer led by one of its founders. No longer able to buy up its competition and grow market share by acquisition. No longer a single flagship LMS provider. No longer a predominantly platform company.

I don't get it. I don't understand the lure of the educational tablet. I say this, of course, as someone who relies heavily on her laptop every day and who just couldn't make an iPad "work" the same way. What are we missing out by pushing tablets onto students? (Or, conversely, what am I missing out by being so skeptical about them?)

I was fortunate to be included in a retirement party for Duke Political Science professor, David L. Paletz, one of the foremost scholars of Political Communication and a jury chair for the Full Frame Documentary Festival in Durham, N.C. I’ve written about David before in this column -- an inspiring teacher who introduced me to feminism, media critique and a desire to be a filmmaker.

A couple of viral videos caught my eye and reminded me of my first semester as a teacher.