By Joshua Kim. The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin
By Matt Reed. It’s almost Thanksgiving, so a moment of gratitude seems to be in order. By Joshua Kim. My favorite Thanksgiving tradition is when we go around the table and everybody says what they are thankful for. In that spirit, I’d like to share 11 reasons why I’m grateful to work at the intersection of learning and technology. Read more...
By Natascha Chtena. Amidst reports of Steve Jobs and other Silicon Valley CEOs imposing extremely strict technology rules on their children, the debate around technology use in the classroom has caught fire once again. One of the strongest arguments for banning technology in the classroom came earlier this fall, from media pundit Clay Shirky in a piece titled “Why I Just Asked My Students To Put Their Laptops Away.” Read more...
By Rosemarie Emanuele. When I teach probability, I often teach multiplying probabilities using a “tree” diagram. Sometimes these diagrams represent probabilities from a problem, sometimes they represent flips of a coin (that may come up heads or tails), and often they represent children born into a family (that may be boys or girls.) It is that last diagram that I have found myself thinking of lately as I face the first year of winter holidays without my mother. Read more...By Laura Tropp. I have confessed in many of my blog posts how I often feel it is easier to be a professor than a mom. When I’m a professor, I don’t have to get overly emotionally involved with a student’s concerns. I’m able to focus on teaching and let the burden of learning fall on someone else. Read more...By Hanna Peacock. Moving abroad for grad school is an exciting adventure. Unfortunately, moving abroad also comes with many practical challenges. I moved from Canada to Belgium this past September, and found the largest practical challenge was deciding what to bring. The objective, particularly if you are flying, is to bring as few things as possible, since additional or heavy bags are quite expensive to fly with. Now, a few months in, there are some things I’m glad I chose to pack, or not pack—and others that I really wish I had brought along with me. Read more...
By Susan O'Doherty. Our family spent this week in Iceland. We love to travel, and love to travel together. For years we have spent most major holidays out of the country, in out of season locations, since travel is much cheaper to travel at times, and to places, that no one in their right mind would choose. Read more...
By Barbara Fister. Earlier this week I participated in an online conversation about an article that is forthcoming in College & Research Libraries that looks at how a group of librarians at the Claremont Colleges conducted a multi-faceted assessment of information literacy in their first-year seminar program. They collected 99 first year writing samples and analyzed them using a rubric based on one developed at Carleton College (and similar to one we’ve used at my library for years). Read more...
By Barbara Fister. It was what I expected. All the signs were there. A state of emergency declared days in advance. An unusual grand jury process that was essentially a one-sided trial. Months of peaceful protest followed by a week of officials setting up barriers and laying fuses. A decision to wait until dark before making the official announcement – and that, after nearly ten minutes of rambling self-justification. Read more...
