Blogs

For many years, beginning when I was in college, I went to a dentist whose office was within two blocks of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). Whenever the opportunity presented itself, I would also stop at Chock full o’Nuts next door for a brownie. (For those of you who have never heard of this chain, consider it a more vanilla Starbucks.) And if I had extra time, I would spend some time at the MOMA. I won’t say that this made visiting a dentist pleasurable but I always enjoyed the time spent at the MOMA.

Social media have been a frequent topic on this blog. With ample angles to cover, social media provide an endless supply of questions, ideas, and conversations. Recently, while consulting with a school about their Student Affairs social media strategy, I wrote down a list of words that popped up during our conversations.

Since he first learned to walk, Ben has been passionate about any any activity that involves a ball and running around. He loves playing, watching, and talking about baseball, basketball, football (both kinds, but especially the one we used to call soccer), and, more recently, cricket and rugby. Bill shares many of these interests, and for the most part, I am happy to leave them to it.

Danny Boyle's Olympic Opening Ceremony was unexpectedly enjoyable. From the opening ring (courtesy of Bradley Wiggins) of a 27 ton bell, to the closing festivities, it conveyed a multilayered and multivalent sense of many aspects of what Britain is and isn't (a point deftly made by the New Yorker late last night). As Boyle himself put it, "The Ceremony is an attempt to capture a picture of ourselves as a nation, where we have come from and where we want to be."

We all know the score: despite the continued growth in post-graduate degrees, full-time, permanent positions in academia are increasingly rare. In 2009, part-time faculty members represented more than half of all faculty in teaching positions and only 30 percent of all faculty held tenure track positions. Certainly, to search for work in today’s over-saturated academic market, in the depths of a recession, is no easy task; as a newly minted PhD, this is a fact I know all to well.

As I put together the annual report for the library, I spent a lot of time looking at numbers. One of them was the average cost of articles we provided to faculty published in journals we can’t afford and which we couldn’t get free through interlibrary loan. The average cost we paid per article? $41.89. This is making me think about the costs of our stern new religion of austerity.

An occasional correspondent writes: "How much do instructors have to adapt their courses and their styles to the needs of the students?"

Probably the closest that I'll get to being invited to give a TED Talk is Chris Anderson tweeting about something that I wrote. Last week, in response to my critique that $14.99 is too expensive for a 6 book / 3 month TED book subscription (through TED's new iOS app), Chris tweeted from @TEDchris, "Is $15 too much for 22 short, multimedia enabled books?! http://bit.ly/NNXitg http://bit.ly/Njqo1c"