Blogs

When I first got professionally involved with campus sustainability, there was really only one first principle: greenhouse gas emissions are causing global warming, and the higher education sector needed to show America how to correct that. Call it First Principles v1.0.

July being July, meetings take on a different tone than they have during the rest of the year.

Earlier this school year I wrote about mentoring as part of my mandate for the year, and now that my school year is ending I have time to reflect on how this worked for me and my students. I work with lots of students. In previous years the number was close to 1200 students per year. This last year, I had a teaching release and taught more than 900 students. I am also an Undergraduate Advisor, which means that students can potentially get lots of face time with me.

What would happen if the academic IT Department became the academic Collaboration Department?

I did not know what to expect at the “Sustainability Across the Curriculum Leadership Workshop” I attended last week at...

A little over a year and a half ago, I wrote a post describing how I was finally going to get rid of my collection of Canadian Literature (and corresponding critical materials). In it, I lamented how I would never use or read the books ever again (or even for the first time). It was time, I declared, to let go of the past, who I was professionally, and embrace who I was becoming. How things have changed in a short 18 months.

Are many people still in the throes of anti-Microsoft views, now long in the tooth of Internet time? Are many still swimming in the miasma of Google glory? Or do they know something about the negotiations that higher education has had with both of these companies over the last many years that I don't know?

Last week I had a passing conversation with a counterpart from another, more rural, part of my state. She mentioned that the big political issue on her campus is trying to get some sort of mobile broadband coverage on campus. None of the big four telecoms -- soon to become three, I’m guessing -- want to be bothered, since the population density just isn’t there, and the area isn’t terribly affluent. The students and faculty are increasingly upset, since mobile devices are all the rage now, but mobile devices without internet access are basically paperweights.