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Where do you situate yourself for lectures, keynotes, and conference talks?

I jumped on a plane recently to try and assist my son Nick with changing his “F’s” to “D’s” or “C’s” on his high school report card in order to graduate in June. His father and I realize that our last ditch efforts to discipline may be ‘too little too late’ for our son, but Nick understands that he cannot move out of his Dad’s house (or into my empty one) until he gets a GED. I let Nick know that some of the readers of this column are interested in hearing from him about his high school burnout, and he may, in fact, write a response to my maternal blogging (after we get through the next three weeks.)

The city of Backboro, like many northeastern cities, has chronically aging infrastructure. A key element of our transportation infrastructure is fast approaching the end of its usable life, and the city parents (we used to say "city fathers", so I guess "parents" must be the current term) are doing a creditable job of planning for its replacement.

Botswana has accepted tertiary education as a critical driver in creating an “educated and informed nation” for economic diversification and global competitiveness. The government has made a strategic choice to replace diamonds and minerals with human skills as a more reliable and sustainable economic and social development strategy.

My last post was severe in its critical intensity. I poked around…posited and provoked. Innovation is such a buzzword these days. Getting a blogger to write about innovation is as easy as getting me to drink coffee. For this post, I wanted to be more generative than critical. While I've never defined "radical student affairs" on this blog…nor will I ever define it concretely (peaceful acceptance of ambiguity is fairly radical, right?), I realize that pushing and provoking requires ideas. Innovation requires ideation and something to chew on…to mull over. In that spirit, and in no particular order, here are some thoughts on how Student Affairs can become more innovative as a profession:

Ideally, I suppose, I should headline this post "5 Things I've Learned from MOOCs." That's likely what a course -- massive or online or open or not -- is supposed to have a student tout: what I learned. If I were being really forthright with my readers, I would headline this story "5 Things I've Learned from MOOCs as a Serial MOOC Dropout." That's certainly a warning that when I speak about my recent experiences with MOOCs, it's as a lurker and a dropout. But here are five things I definitely recognize that matter to me in terms of my success and completion in these courses.

As I shuffled through the morning paper today, supping a much needed cup of coffee, I came across a story about the innovative architect Thom Mayne (of Morphosis) being selected to design the first building of Cornell University’s Applied Sciences NYC campus. This unique development initiative, outlined in detail here ('Unsettling the university-territory relationship via Applied Sciences NYC'), is rolling forward with considerable speed.

I sat on a pedagogy round-table at the International Studies Association in March, and one of the speakers referred to the high cost of emotional labor for the Women's Studies instructor. Many heads nodded around the room.