By Susan O'Doherty. I have wanted to produce and direct a film for some time now. I don't aspire to actually be a producer or director, but I am curious about aspects of filmmaking that I don't have experience with, and I am a hands-on learner. Read more...
By Susan O'Doherty. I used to work in a troubled, overcrowded inner city elementary school. Some terrific kids went there, but even the brightest and most industrious weren't learning much. There were usually 30-35 students in a class, with an overwhelmed, burned-out teacher. Read more...
By Susan O'Doherty. My first round of trying to "make it" as an actor — high school through my early thirties — was marked by a lack of ambition that a number of my teachers, colleagues and friends found troubling. Read more...
By Barbara Fister. Tracy Mitrano asks “Is the 4th Amendment dead in cyberspace?” She thinks the distinction between metadata and the content it is attached to can no longer be treated separately by U.S. law. I concur, and agree with her that FISA, a court created after the COINTELPRO hearings to give intelligence services some judicial oversight, needs to be thoroughly reformed if not abolished. Read more...
By Barbara Fister. I have cited danah boyd’s book It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens whenever the subject of teens, social media, and privacy arise since it first came out. She convinced me that teens not only value privacy, they understand why it matters better than many adults do. Read more...
By Barbara Fister. Joshua Kim honored me by paying attention when I was one of those annoying people tugging his elbow to say “hey, you have to read this book!” (The book in question is Data and Goliath by Bruce Schneier. By the way, you have to read this book, too.) Read more...
By Barbara Fister. When we talk about higher education, Americans have a tendency to focus on some imaginary place that looks a bit like Harvard, has absurdly luxurious climbing walls and lazy rivers, involves months of campus visits and an anxious wait for acceptance letters before plunging students into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. Read more...
By John Warner. Perhaps if you believe universities are fundamentally dysfunctional and deserve to go the way the dodo, you will write an op-ed for the New York Times as deliberately misleading as Kevin Carey’s latest effort, “The Fundamental Way That Universities Are an Illusion.” Read more...
By John Warner. As the mania for measuring learning “outcomes” seems to continue unabated, primarily through standardized metrics, I’m wondering what kind of tool we can develop to quantify the number and impact of “mind blowing” moments. Read more...
By John Warner. It is safe to say that I would not be here, doing this, if not for the assistance of mentors.
One of the most important of those mentors was my undergraduate creative writing professor at the University of Illinois, Philip Graham. He’s been present in just about every stage of my career since I first entered his introductory fiction writing course. Read more...
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