Blogs

May wasn't a good month for Facebook. Their long-awaited IPO didn't go exactly as planned. Articles such as "7 Reasons Why Facebook IPO Was A Bust" from Forbes summed up the situation rather bluntly. Now I don't invest in the stock market, but I do know that people invest in a company because they think that it will make money which will in turn make them money. With Facebook, it would seem that people aren't convinced that the world's largest social network can deliver on its promises.

At THATCamp CHNM this year, Mark Sample proposed a session on "Building a Better Blogging Assignment". Those present shared their experiences from assigning blogs in past courses and also exchanged models and ideas for assignments that best fit their course objectives.

My daughter said recently, “Mom does still have a tiny sense of humor, it’s just buried deep down inside the momness.” As we finished off the semester and are preparing for our move across the country in August, there is always just too much to squeeze into a day, leaving much stressful unfinished business that seems to get done only just before it absolutely needs to. In these times, you need to remember to laugh, and I thank my daughter for reminding me.

Last week at this time I was about to leave for my annual conference, which is now over. As I mentioned, I brought my daughter with me, and I promised to report back on how attending a conference with her went. In a word: great.

In the wake of the mess at UVA, in which a President was pushed out by a rogue faction of a Board that felt she lacked “strategic dynamism,” those of us who follow these things have been left to wonder just what that might mean.

We’re halfway through the academic year in South Africa, and like many of my colleagues, I’ve been catching my breath after the deluge of marking which arrived at the end of the first semester. I’ve taught since beginning my graduate studies, and have marked students’ essays and exam scripts both in South Africa and the UK. Over the past eight years, what has struck me is that the quality of students’ writing and research hasn’t varied all that greatly; I can remember a few very bad, and some brilliant, pieces of work, but I haven’t noticed a decline or marked improvement in the standard of the work submitted to me.

It's retreat season once again. Does your department, team, division, or group have any plans for an offsite retreat? Where are you going? Can you offer any advice about retreat best practices.

When ifttt (it's lowercase, so it has to be cool, right?) first appeared on the social tech scene, I took a gander and then I moved on. Thankfully, I know enough about companies with unique names to not put them on permanent ignore. ifttt (I was going to make a bell hooks reference about capitalization…it didn't work.) is all about figuring out the connections between "if this then that." The functionality of ifttt is built around tasks, actions, and channels. For example, let's say you wanted to save your Instagram photos into your Dropbox account. With ifttt, it's simple, the community has already created that particular recipe.