Writer, Professor, and Everything Else
I’m not enrolled/participating in any MOOCs right now, I think pretty much for the first time in about a year. I’m busy with summer stuff (expect a gardening post soon), upcoming travel and other MOOC writing/editing things. There are plenty of options to choose from on Coursera’s web site right now– including a course called …
Continue reading “Yet another miscellaneous MOOC link round-up”
The other day via the trackback notifications here, I learned that MLA President (or I guess now past President?) Michael Bérubé mentioned one of my previous blog post in his recent 2013 Presidential Address, though he doesn’t quote me per se. Hey, I’ll take whatever attention I can get. I agree with just about everything Bérubé says …
Making its rounds on the intertubes yesterday was this article/blog post/something by Susan Adams at Forbes, “The Least Stressful Jobs of 2013.” The winner? University professor, of course! The article is so factually inaccurate in so many different ways that there’s really no point in explaining why. But there are two interesting aspects of the way …
Continue reading “On having “The Least Stressful” Job of 2013″
There’s been a couple of interesting developments in higher education news in the last couple of days that has me thinking more about how the “education” part of things in colleges and universities actually works. First, there’s the announcement that U of M and several other universities will be offering “free courses” on a variety …
It’s not often that Michael Bérubé responds specifically to me, as he does here in the comments on this post on the blog Crooked Timber called “More about adjuncts.” I don’t expect anyone to read all those links, so to very briefly summarize: under his leadership as president, the Modern Language Association has taken up the cause of …
Continue reading “In response to Michael Bérubé on Crooked Timber”
I have many other things I need to do (in the midst of teaching in the short spring term, minutes and notes from a meeting last week need to be written up and sent out, I have some writing about assessment I want to post here soon, etc.), but I thought I’d post briefly something …
“Why Do They Hate Us?” is a commentary in the most recent Chronicle of Higher Education by Thomas “not his real name” Benton where he laments the sorry state of “anger about professors.” This piece gives me pause right out of the gate when he begins recapping a series of not so hypothetical unpleasant conversations …
Again, in no particular order– just things I want to keep track of that I have left open in my browser for a while now: “Reading in a Whole New Way,” which is a very readable/accessible piece about how technology has altered the sense of “book,” from Smithsonian.com. And this is a link to the …
I’ve been working all day trying to figure out what my classes for the winter term (which starts tomorrow) are going to look like. I was going to write “working my ass off,” but let’s face it: working in academia isn’t exactly manual labor, a point I’ll return to in a moment. It involves a …
I was born in Wisconsin, I lived in several different places as a child, and I have lived in and near Ypsilanti, Michigan now for longer than I have lived anywhere else, but I still consider Cedar Falls, Iowa to be my home town. After graduating high school in 1984, I attended the University of …