Blogs

Graduate assistantships often dictate the pathways for a student affairs professional. Our experience during our masters program can have long-lasting impacts on our functional area choice post-grad school. Oftentimes, our assistantship department is able to send us to at least one professional association conference. Usually, we choose the association and its conference based on the job that we’re doing in exchange for a tuition remission / stipend. However, how many people in their student affairs graduate program learn about what I like to call “the student affairs association acronym soup”?

The computer club had a bake sale on campus. As I neared the table, one of the students called out “Save a nerd! Buy a cookie!” Impressed, I complied.

Barbara Fister writes in "The Myth of the Bookless Library", "No matter how innovative the bookless library sounds, this isn't a situation we planned. If the academic library of the future is bookless, it won’t be because of vision. It will be because of the lack of it." I think I understand the perspective of my library colleagues.

PowerPoint (or Apple’s Keynote) is the most-popular presentation application in the universe. It’s also the only piece of software that is detrimental to the survival of unicorns.

Plagiarism is a penny ante thing, a measly squalor. It's like insider trading - a pervasive, petty, ploy that excites indignation and punishment, but, precisely because of its simmering ubiquity, fails to boil up to a real problem.

I didn’t want to write about the Penn State scandal. People smarter and more insightful than I have already written about it (and continue to) and I have to admit the topic makes me physically ill. I also have never wanted to write a post lamenting all the current events my students know nothing about or even know exist; it’s not particularly constructive, and would only serve the purpose to vent. And yet today, I find myself compelled to write about both those subjects.

What if college got cheaper as you went along?

Ten years ago, Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper published a nifty book about how and why people use paper in their workplaces. The Myth of the Paperless Office reported ethnographic observations of people struggling to do things with computers that they were used to doing on paper; sometimes there were good reasons why paper was so persistent. The title reminded us that the “paperless office” we were promised decades ago is a joke - on us. We use more paper than ever and manage to have disorderly desktops both literally and digitally. That's a funny kind of progress.