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Category Archives: Academia
Anatomy of a Search
If there’s anything that I think needs to be learned through experience or through directly witnessing the experience of others, it’s online information-seeking. I don’t think you can give a useful general description of how to search that a student … Continue reading
I For One Welcome My New Infrared Faucet Overlord
Interesting post and discussion at 11d on Sandra Tsing Loh’s latest essay in the Atlantic Monthly, which I read on the train this week. I thought the essay was terrible for a variety of reasons, many of them stylistic. There’s … Continue reading
If You Must
Via Margaret Soltan, an interesting thread on PowerPoint in the classroom. I still think that PointPoint is a scapegoat of sorts, that bad pedagogy that uses PowerPoint was bad before PointPoint or even personal computers were involved in higher education. … Continue reading
The (Skilled) Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
Our Associate Provost is organizing a workshop to talk about how (or perhaps whether) we teach presentation and speaking skills in our courses. I’m planning to attend: I think it’s a really important issue. I worry a lot about many … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Swarthmore
5 Comments
Digital Search II: A User Perspective on Database Design
If I’m anxious about Google becoming a database vendor, it’s partly because the user experience with existing databases has been so dismal to date. On the other hand, Google’s understanding of and commitment to usability is head and shoulders above … Continue reading
Digital Search I: Google Poisons the Well
I am apparently not the only person who feels a bit bait-and-switched by the state of Google’s digitization projects after the settlement. So much so that Sergey Brin himself has sallied forth to defend the current terms in the New … Continue reading
From Gourmet to the Daily Gazette
I was reminded for the first time in years of the existence of Gourmet magazine a few weeks ago when a foodie colleague of mine started talking about some recipes she’d made from it recently. I used to subscribe to … Continue reading
Course Zero
There’s an interesting article at Inside Higher Education about the new breed of peer-to-peer style sites for collecting student notes and course materials, officially for the purposes of providing study aids. In reality, at least some of the sites in … Continue reading
Effect Size (Again)
Deirdre McCloskey’s great little pamphlet The Secret Sins of Economics, which you can read in expanded form in her books The Cult of Statistical Significance and If You’re So Smart, argues that one of the two “secret sins” mentioned in … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Popular Culture
4 Comments
Student Blogging as Transparency and Education
There’s an interesting piece in the NY Times today about colleges that encourage student blogging as a method of disseminating information about the culture of campus life to prospective students and other outsiders. MIT, unsurprisingly, is the institution with the … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Blogging, Swarthmore
4 Comments