Blogs

I finally could offer my course “Science, Technology and International Relations” this past semester. The course had been on the elective courses list for the last three Spring semesters, but enough students did not register before this year. My guess was that the course topic was the deterrent: it obviously required being interested in science and technology, not a general characteristic of the average social sciences student. However, somehow the tides have turned this year and I found myself with nine students in the classroom.

About two years ago my then nine-year-old son discovered that the public radio station I regularly played in the car...

For most of us, the days of long and leisurely summer vacations are likely over. But after a long spring semester, how are we supposed to rest up for our work during the summer and fall? The summer months offer a great opportunity to reflect on the past academic year and reenergize for the year ahead. Here are a few things you can do to recharge your mind, body, and spirit, whether you have a day, a week, or the entire summer.

When you teach a course for which the prerequisite is “permission of instructor,” on what do you base the decision to grant or withhold permission?

When I saw Scott Jaschik’s piece today about unhappy associate professors, my first thought was, haven’t we already discussed this? Well, yes, we have! Apparently associate professors have been “standing still” for quite some time—at least since the MLA released its report on the rank in 2009, and probably longer.

Yes, I'm late to the party, but my first day at DHSI has taught me that, yes, encoding a document in TEI is an act of critical scholarship.

Every time that I fork over $229.50 to renew my Platinum membership plan at Audible (an Amazon company) I like to mark the occasion and think some about the meaning of this purchase.

I recently finished The Information Diet, and I felt that the metaphor was the most powerful part of this book. Johnson's assertions that our current informational climate serves us up cheap fillers in the way of celebrity news and downright unhealthy partisan rhetoric rang true for me. I have long been concerned about the issue of the Filter Bubble in which all the data that Google, Facebook, and more are collecting about us lead to all the algorithms only showing me what it thinks I want to see. Johnson's Information Diet is a call to action against this and many other informational ills perpetuated by our networked consumption. The challenge issued is to approach consumption of all media in the same way we might approach healthy eating: recognize what is junk and stop consuming it.