Opinion

Yesterday was the kick-off for our campus celebration of Black History Month. After a wonderful introduction by the Provost, a colleague in the History department gave an impassioned, scholarly, engaging presentation that asked the question: what should Black History Month mean to us?

“Why don’t we just automate all of our routine mail?” It all started so innocently, with such a seemingly logical question...

Which is it, collaboration or groupthink? And does the myth of the solitary scholar actually hurt us? We need to be more open on how we collaborate in higher education, even when we don't mean to.

For more than one year, almost every two months, I enjoy writing a book review. Most of the books I am interested in cover the main issues I am focused on in my daily lectures; there are books on political science, history of Central and Eastern Europe, foreign affairs and identity, ethnic minorities and tolerance.

We increasingly depend on companies whose business is collecting information about us – what we read, what we say, what we watch, what we buy, where we go, and who we know. It’s scary how much the tools that we use every day capture and use personal information - and how little we care. But perhaps that will soon change. Both Facebook and Google will be revealing some of the astounding amount of information they’ve gathered about us, and it may make people uncomfortable enough to stir things up.

Sometimes I regret not pursuing a life on the tenure track. Academic freedom and job security both sound pretty good. Life took me in a different direction, however, and at points I need to remind myself that it has been a pretty good ride.

Tech bloggers were awake and ready in the wee hours of the morning to "live blog" the highly anticipated Facebook IPO today. While the filing didn't come until later this afternoon, there's still going to be plenty of ink spilled over the numbers that it reveals. What's interesting to me as part of the S-1 filing is a letter from CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg. In it, he speaks of "The Hacker Way" as part of the Facebook culture. When we think about how technology can and will change education, what's to be learned from this sort of philosophy?