Blogs

The very term "productivity system" makes me happy -- I like to think systematically in order to design solutions to problems and I enjoy learning about and creating new systems for doing things.

Thanks to my membership in the Library Society of the World, an anarchic group of librarians who pay no dues and have no rules (my people!), I get useful information (and many moments of laughter and delight) on a regular basis. Two bits of recent news made me think about how quickly things can change in the mostly-digital library.

Who are the media companies dipping into the education business? They include: Discovery (the cable TV company), News Corp, NBCUniversal, and Walt Disney.

My first teaching day is a week away and I think my syllabus is ready, amazingly. I e-mailed a link to it to all my students and I believe it was less than an hour before a student e-mailed me back to ask about a date confusion--alas, there was a typo in what I sent out. It's fixed now, but it's not exactly how I intended to appear to my students. Ah, well, perhaps it's just as well that they get used to the idea that I am not, in fact, always going to be right. (Far from it.)

· My first teaching day is a week away and I think my syllabus is ready, amazingly. I e-mailed a...

It's the first week of school. Hooray?

What to do when development strategies for a city-region change, but there is limited higher education capacity in said region? This issue emerged this summer when, following a work-related visit to Beijing in late July, I spent four fascinating days in Yeosu, a city of approximately 300,000 located near the southeast tip of South Korea.

One of the great things about the ASA Annual meetings is the Film/Video Screenings. While I missed the one showing of Jessica Valenti’s The Purity Myth, I did get to catch Erik Santiago’s Five Friends, which was very moving. The film focuses on male friendships and centers on a 65-year old man named Hank. (While watching the film, I couldn’t help but think of my husband and 7-year old son who were participating in a Father/Son weekend at a boy’s camp on Squam Lake in NH (aka the On Golden Pond lake)).