The title is a .signature line that somebody– Emmet O’Brien, I think, but I’m not sure– used to use on Usenet, back in the mid-to-late 90’s, when some people referred to the Internet as the “Information Superhighway.” I’ve always thought it was pretty apt, especially as I’ve moved into blogdom, where a lot of what… Continue reading Welcome to the Information Supercollider
Category: Academia
Overthought Reviews of Genre Fiction
One of the perils of book reviewing, or any other form of literary analysis is putting more thought into some aspect of a book than the author did. It’s one of the aspects of the humanities aide of academia that, from time to time, strains my ability to be respectful of the scholarly activities of… Continue reading Overthought Reviews of Genre Fiction
Alternatives to Lab Reports?
An academic email list that I’m on has started a discussion of lab writing, pointing out that students in some lab classes spend more time on writing lab reports in a quasi-journal-article format format than they do taking and analyzing data. This “feels ” wrong in many ways, and the person who kicked off the… Continue reading Alternatives to Lab Reports?
Survey-Related Inadequacies
I recently participated in a survey of higher education professionals about various aspects of the job. It was very clearly designed by and aimed at scholars in the humanities and social sciences, to the point where answering questions honestly made me feel like a Bad Person. For example, there were numerous questions about teaching methods… Continue reading Survey-Related Inadequacies
Education Reform Is Slow
Kevin Drum notes a growing backlash against education reform, citing Diane Ravitch, Emily Yoffe and this Newsweek (which is really this private foundation report in disguise) as examples. The last of these, about the failed attempts of several billionaires to improve education through foundation grants, is really kind of maddening. It makes the billionaires in… Continue reading Education Reform Is Slow
Big Brother Is Evaluating Your Teaching
The New York Times ran a couple of op-eds on Sunday about education policy. One, by Dave Eggers and Ninive Clements Calegari is familair stuff to anyone who’s heard me talk about the subject before: teachers in the US are, on the whole, given fewer resources than they need to succeed, paid less well than… Continue reading Big Brother Is Evaluating Your Teaching
Academic Poll: Humans vs. Zombies
Union’s edition of the chase-each-other-with-Nerf-guns game Humans vs. Zombies kicks off next week, and has prompted some discussion of whether this is just a harmless way of blowing off steam, or an existential threat to the core mission of academia. While some of this has been vaguely entertaining, it ignores the really important question: Who… Continue reading Academic Poll: Humans vs. Zombies
Hugo Humiliation
Over in LiveJournal land, nwhyte just finished reading all the Hugo-winning novels, and provides a list of them with links to reviews or at least short comments. He also gives a summary list of his take on the best and worst books of the lot. The obvious thing to do with such a list, particularly… Continue reading Hugo Humiliation
Great Moments in Campus Visits
It’s college admissions season, which means a steady influx of high-school seniors thinking about coming here next year, making campus visits. Most of these students sit in on at least one class, to get an idea of what it’s like. Which occasionally leads to odd things, but nothing stranger than what just happened: a prospective… Continue reading Great Moments in Campus Visits
“This Union, Is There Gonna Be Meetings?”
I’m deep in editing mode at the moment, and faintly depressed at the number of words I have managed to remove by changes like turning “was [verb]ing ” to “[verb]ed.” It’s a tedious and labor-intensive process that is weirdly exhausting– all I’m doing is sitting in a cafe somewhere reading text with a red pen… Continue reading “This Union, Is There Gonna Be Meetings?”