Blogs

With the book officially revealed, it’s time to drop the pseudonym. I don’t want the book discredited by the anonymity of its author, and I’m enough of a realist to know that someone would spill the beans quickly anyway, just to prove that they could.

I received an email from MLA recently addressed to “Professor Silva.” It made me smile, but immediately after that it made me furrow my brow. Professor Silva? Who is this Professor Silva? Nothing in my past emails indicated I was a professor. I put it away, thinking it may have just been a mistake. But it bothered me a little: I did not want to claim “Professor” when I am not one.

An interesting question caught my eye recently: what’s the half-life of knowledge, for facts we think we know?

Did you check out the Pearson's OpenClass booth at EDUCAUSE? If not, it is worth spending some time on the new OpenClass site www.openclass.com.

Last week I received my daughter's last college tuition bill. When I started writing this blog, she had not yet graduated from high school -- can it be? I looked at the tuition bill with a mixture of anxiety and gratitude.

"Kentucky is the ugly truth the NCAA wants to hide, and Duke is the hysterical lie they hide it with."

"Kentucky is the ugly truth the NCAA wants to hide, and Duke is the hysterical lie they hide it with."

We've reached that point in the semester that can become oppressive for TAs and grad students teaching their own courses. Those essay assignments that seemed like such a good idea back in September are seeming distinctly less so as teetering piles of ungraded papers on your desk. Just as your own semester workload is increasing and deadlines loom for conference abstracts, job applications, travel grants, and summer internships, here comes the dreaded stack of unmarked papers, some of which you know will consume more of your time than they did of their authors.