Category Archives: Thoughts

Books on Higher Education are coming out fast and furious. A colleague drew my attention to another, entitled We’re Losing Our Minds, discussed in Inside Higher Education. The following paragraph caught my attention: Thinking of undergraduate degrees as commodities — tickets … Continue reading →

I spoke to my classes today about The Chronicle piece that described recent evidence on best teaching practices in the college classroom. I poked fun at it — Harvard found that students don’t like to take quizzes, that teachers don’t … Continue reading →

I was making coffee this morning, yrgacheffe, and started thinking about librarians that I know (or have known). Rolling through the list, which is a decent length, I began to realize that many of these folks kept working in libraries … Continue reading →

We led off the Punctuation course this past Thursday with the following quotation from William H. Glass (found in Virginia Tufte’s lovely Artful Sentences): Simplicity is not a given. It is an achievement, a human invention, a discovery, a beloved belief. … Continue reading →

In this winter that so far has not been (winter), it’s another beautiful day. Walking to K-wing a few moments ago I saw physical plant workers planting evergreen shrubs in the new tree planters outside the new art gallery. There … Continue reading →

We were talking about sacred texts and Irish monks in two classes today. In Punctuation, I described early Irish monks who were new to both Christianity and Latin. They knew that they copied sacred texts in a language not their … Continue reading →

The internet has changed our access to books in many ways. I’ve been thinking about three of the more obvious ones: The internet has made interlibrary loan very easy. At Stockton, just go to the Interlibrary Loan Screen, found under … Continue reading →

In the punctuation course today we began sentence-level grammatical analysis — you need a base in grammar to discuss punctuation. In Research we discussed provenance written in an English Reader (printed in Albany, NY in 1834). In Medieval Ireland we … Continue reading →

Yesterday in Research I asked students to begin an analysis of Wikipedia. A student raised his hand and said, “Wikipedia is closed tomorrow in protest of SOPA.” Interesting. In many ways, the Research course is a class on information management. … Continue reading →

Were there any threads connecting Punctuation, Research, and Irish? Maybe one — I talk a lot and feel there is not enough time to cover the material. O how I long for 17-week semesters (at least at the start of … Continue reading →