Hoods -> Sha Na Na -> Greasers -> The Fonz

Columbia College Today, September/October 2008

Sha Na Na and the Invention of the Fifties
By George J. Leonard and Robert A. Leonard

In 1969, the Kingsmen, Columbia's traditional a capella group, gambled on a new concept. At a Wollman concert, "The Glory That Was Grease," the Kingsmen, outfitted in gold lamé and sporting Elvis Presley hairdos, performed original dances while singing classic Fifties rock 'n' roll. That led to a memorable "Grease Under the Stars" concert on Low Plaza, soon after which they shot to stardom, opening for Jimi Hendrix at the original Woodstock Festival. Renamed Sha Na Na, they became regulars at Fillmore West and East, appeared in the Oscar-winning Woodstock movie as well as the movie version of Grease, which their act had inspired. Their syndicated TV show ran for years, worldwide.

... Contemporary scholars of American cultural history have begun writing that Sha Na Na's greatest achievement was the invention of a new American era: the "Fifties." ... Brothers and founding members George J. Leonard '67, '68 GSAS, '72 GSAS, who conceived and choreographed the Kingsmen's change to Sha Na Na, and Robert A. Leonard '70, '73 GSAS, '82 GSAS, the group's first president and gold lamé singer, report on the new scholarly interest in Sha Na Na. ...

Read the full article at:

http://www.college.columbia.edu/cct/sep_oct08/features1

-- Found via Arts & Letters Daily

Good IT management requires a different skill set

PBS Previews, September 25, 2008

I, CRINGELY

Leadership: Post-industrial management requires a different skill set.

Bob Cringely offers ideas on what makes for good IT management.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080917_005420.html

--------------------

PBS Previews and PBS Teacher Previews are from the Public Broadcasting Service. For more info or to subscribe, visit:
http://pbs.org/previews/

Why are good teachers strange, uncool, offbeat?

The New York Times Sunday Magazine, September 19, 2008

Geek Lessons
By Mark Edmundson

... Why are good teachers strange, uncool, offbeat?

Because really good teaching is about not seeing the world the way that everyone else does. ...

... Good teachers perceive the world in alternative terms, and they push their students to test out these new, potentially enriching perspectives. ...

... Good teachers know that now, in what's called the civilized world, the great enemy of knowledge isn't ignorance, though ignorance will do in a pinch. The great enemy of knowledge is knowingness. It's the feeling encouraged by TV and movies and the Internet that you're on top of things and in charge. You're hip and always know what's up. Cool — James Dean-style cool — was once the sign of the rebel. But the tables have turned: conformity and cool have merged. The cool character now is the knowing one; even when he's unconventional, he's never surprising — and most of all, he's never surprised. Good teachers, by contrast, are constantly fighting against knowingness by asking questions, creating difficulties, raising perplexities. ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/magazine/21wwln-lede-t.html

Good leaders inspire

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944), French author and aviator

Increase your Facebook productivity

Recommended by Ari Herzog:

Kathryn Pope offers practical advice and tips to increase your Facebook productivity.

http://www.appvita.com/2008/07/31/facebook-friending-the-world/

Facebook’s app developers can see 32 elements of user profiles

Link posted by Ari Herzog as a comment on David Pogue's NYTimes.com blog:

... Facebook's application developers are able to see 32 elements from [user] profiles. ...

http://www.ariwriter.com/2008/09/how-you-have-no-privacy-online.html

Stop Googling, start questioning

Found via Arts & Letters Daily:

Will we remain obsessed with the diminishing quality of the answers to our online queries, and not with the underlying problem of our poor quality education [and the] lack of critical thought? ...

The society of the query and the Googlization of our lives
A tribute to Joseph Weizenbaum

by Geert Lovink

"There is only one way to turn signals into information, through interpretation," wrote the computer critic Joseph Weizenbaum [the MIT professor known for his 1966 automatic therapy program ELIZA and his 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason]. As Google's hegemony over online content increases, argues Geert Lovink, we should stop searching and start questioning.

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-09-05-lovink-en.html

Bringing history online, one newspaper at a time

From the Official Google Blog:

Today, we're launching an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/bringing-history-online-one-newspaper.html

Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet

Today in Salon: August 29, 2008

The road to Wikipedia
By Laura Miller

How do we know what we know? A new book [by two historians] takes a long view of knowledge, from ancient oral traditions to the rise of universities and the Internet.

Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet
by Ian F. McNeely and Lisa Wolverton

http://salon.com/books/review/2008/08/28/knowledge/

NOTE: Anyone can get a "free pass" to read Salon articles by viewing an online ad. Just wait for the "Enter Salon" link to appear. Be patient; sometimes there's a noticeable pause before that happens.

Another enthusiastic review from Amazon Top 50 reviewer Robert D. Steele includes links to other books with supporting themes.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R2KE1ORAJDJNI6/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

The human face reveals much

National Post, August 12, 2008

Facial Frontier by Robert Fulford

... In the view of Raymond Tallis, an eminent British doctor and a talented writer, the face of a man or woman constitutes "the most sign-packed surface in the universe." Nothing else we see carries more meaning. Every face displays a pattern of dense emotional responses in the present and an archive of its owner's experience in the past. And each one is both unique and mysterious. ...

... In recent times, however, faces have changed, making them harder to read. We are developing a face for our era. Botox is one reason ... [but] Newsreader Standard is a considerably older face produced by our civilization. It's the universal mask, more or less the same from Tokyo to Brussels, through which we receive information on TV. By tradition, newsreaders show no emotion, so many of us every day spend time looking at faces that are by intention flat and generic, far from what we would regard (in private life) as human. ...

... In ordinary life, what people want when they stare at the faces of others is acknowledgement. We want a sense that we exist. Tallis quotes Hegel's view that humans hunger above all for recognition by other humans. Connection is the key. Knowingly or not, we all yearn for it and may fall to pieces without it. ... 

For more, read The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head by Raymond Tallis (Yale University Press).

http://www.nationalpost.com/story-printer.html?id=15a16cb3-076e-41d1-bbd4-f13edbc8b281

Too much access to info can stifle scientific creativity

Found via SciTech Daily:

National Science Foundation Press Release 08-120

Research publications online: Too much of a good thing? 

Having research papers and other scholarly writing available online gives researchers access to a great deal of materials without having to enter a library. But how does this impact the new research that they produce? James Evans at the University of Chicago has studied this question and his conclusion is surprising -- despite having greater access to scholarly materials, researchers are actually citing fewer papers. The papers they do cite tend to be newer and are likely to be cited by other researchers.

Full NSF press release available at:

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=111928

Survey Finds Citations Growing Narrower as Journals Move Online
Jennifer Couzin, Science, 18 July 2008: 329.

A sociologist argues on page 395 of this week's issue of Science that making scholarly articles available online has narrowed citations to more recent and less diverse articles than before -- the opposite of what most people expected.

PhD = Perfectionism hampers Dissertations !

This phrase just popped into my head this morning while making green tea. 

PhD = Perfectionists hate Dissertations!

I e-mailed the above to a friend and she answered: 

See, green tea really is that good for you.

LOL! After still more green tea, I have revised this to: 

PhD = Perfectionism hampers Dissertations!

The battle that reshaped children’s literature

The New Yorker, July 21, 2008

The Lion and the Mouse
by Jill Lepore

One way to read E.B. White's Stuart Little is as an indictment of both the childishness of children's literature and the juvenilization of American culture.

... Between 1881 and 1917, Andrew Carnegie underwrote the construction of more than [1,600] public libraries in the United States, buildings from which children were routinely turned away, because they needed to be protected from morally corrupting books, especially novels. ...

In 1896, Anne Carroll Moore was given the task of running ... the Children's Library of the Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, built at a time when the Brooklyn schools had a policy that "children below the third grade do not read well enough to profit from the use of library books." ...

... Much of what Moore did in that room had never been done before, or half as well. She brought in storytellers and, in her first year, organized two hundred story hours (and ten times as many two years later). She compiled a list of [2,500] standard titles in children's literature. She won the right to grant borrowing privileges to children; by 1913, children's books accounted for a third of all the volumes borrowed from New York's branch libraries. ...

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/21/080721fa_fact_lepore

3 keys to change at work & in life

For many years, I've said that teaching technology often seems like amateur therapy. When a learner begins a conversation by saying something negative about computers, you may need to overcome their resistance, some self-esteem issues, "learned helplessness" (thank you, Carol Dweck), stereotype threat, etc.

In this January 2007 Fast Company excerpt from the introduction to his new book, Change or Die: The Three Keys to Change at Work and in Life, Alan Deutschman discusses the framework to successfully change yourself.

http://www.fastcompany.com/articles/2007/01/change-or-die.html

My "take-away" from this article:

1. Relate: You form a new emotional relationship with a person or community that inspires and sustains hope (in yourself and your ability to change).
2. Repeat: The new relationship helps you learn, practice and master the new habits and skills that you'll need.
3. Reframe: The new relationship helps you learn news ways of thinking about your situation and your life.

Deutschman tells stories about the heart patients of Dr. Dean Ornish, criminals in San Francisco's Delancey Street program, and auto workers at a California GM plant that became a Toyota plant (note MacGregor's Theory X and Theory Y re: leadership).

You could also relate Deutschman's 3 keys to most 12-step programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous and all of its cousins, including for-profit diet counseling programs such as Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig. It's all about the relationship!

Other Deutschman articles in Fast Company, May 2005:

Change or Die

All leadership comes down to this: changing people's behavior. Why is that so damn hard? Science offers some surprising new answers -- and ways to do better.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/94/open_change-or-die.html

What Stage of Change Are You In?

While studying how smokers quit the habit, Dr. James Prochaska, a psychologist at the University of Rhode Island, developed a widely influential model of the "stages of change." What stage are you in?

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/94/open_change-or-die-fasttake2.html

Teach deep, strategic computer insights

On February 26, 2007, usability guru Jakob Nielsen wrote for his Alertbox e-newsletter:

Lifelong Computer Skills

Schools should teach deep, strategic computer insights that can't be learned from reading a manual.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/computer-skills.html

Do researchers read the articles they cite?

On July 8, 2008, Inside Higher Ed Daily Update wrote:

CITE CHECK

A scholarly paper finds that a significant proportion of academic citations are faulty, suggesting that many researchers don't read the articles they reference.

http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/07/08/citation

Scroll to the bottom of the article to download a PDF copy of the paper (includes critical responses to it):

Armstrong, J. S. & M. Wright (2008). The Ombudsman: Verification of Citations: Fawlty Towers of Knowledge? Interfaces, 38(2), 125-139.

New prof's first year on the job

On July 7, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education Career Network wrote:

A primer for new professors on what to expect in the first year on the job.

http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/07/2008070701c.htm

Quote of the day: David Lynch on creativity

It's good for the artist to understand conflict and stress. Those things can give you ideas. But I guarantee you, if you have enough stress, you won't be able to create. And if you have enough conflict, it will just get in the way of your creativity. ...

... It's common sense: The more the artist is suffering, the less creative he is going to be. It's less likely that he is going to enjoy his work and less likely that he will be able to do really good work.

-- David Lynch, filmmaker, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity, pp. 93

Quote of the day: Uninterrupted time

Note to artists and writers -- including "dissertators":

If you want to get one hour of good painting in, you have to have four hours of uninterrupted time.

-- Bushnell Keeler, painter, quoted by filmmaker David Lynch in his book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity, p. 11

Others have said it and my personal experience confirms it: If you want to accomplish a creative task, it helps to block out 3 to 4 hours of time in your schedule on a regular basis.

• Accept that you must have a warm-up period or ritual. It may not seem very productive but it does contribute to your creative process. Musicians play scales and other warm-up exercises. Choreographer Twyla Tharp describes her morning ritual in her book The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use it for Life: A Practical Guide.
  
  
• Why 4 hours instead of 3? I suggest regularly blocking out that 4th hour to accommodate the days on which you really get into the flow of the activity and you don't want to stop.
  
  
• If you're not having a good or great "creative" day, allow yourself to stop after Hour 3 -- use that fourth hour to do something *completely different* that recharges your creative energy for the next day's work.
  
  An Olympic athlete might perform a cooldown ritual that includes stretching, so think of this as stretching your creativity by using different creative or expressive muscles than the ones you just exercised.
  
  
• Speaking of cooldowns, consider establishing your own cooldown routine in which you leave yourself notes about what you were doing as you finished. This will help you pick up your project more quickly at your next session.
  
  For my dissertation, it really helped to do this on any of my statistics output or graphics -- What data files did I use and what output files did I create using them? What are they supposed to show? What should I consider changing before running more SAS code?
  
  
• Except for rare occasions when you're close to an important deadline, do NOT work more than 4 hours per day on a dissertation. You need other activities to stay balanced physically and mentally.
  

What the Internet is doing to our brains

The Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2008

Is Google Making Us Stupid?
by Nicholas Carr

What the Internet is doing to our brains.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

What is the Internet doing to our brains?

The Observer (U.K.), June 22, 2008

I Google, therefore I am losing the ability to think
by John Naughton

... What's surprising in a way is that people should be surprised by this. The web, after all, was designed by a chap (Tim Berners-Lee) who was motivated to do it because he had a poor memory for some things. Add powerful search engines to what he created and you effectively have a global memory-prosthesis. ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jun/22/googlethemedia.internet

Agnotology: The study of ignorance

On June 25, 2008, Inside Higher Ed Daily Update wrote:

PLENTY TO GO AROUND

A new field of research is emerging, devoted to the study of ignorance. Scott McLemee did not know that.

http://insidehighered.com/views/2008/06/25/mclemee

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology

Noise pollution makes us sick and anxious

On June 25, 2008, Salon Newsletter wrote:

Cover Story: Stop the noise!
By Katharine Mieszkowski

When noise pollution is not making us sick and anxious, it is literally killing us. How do we turn it off?

... "The human auditory system is designed to serve as a means of warning against dangers in the environment," explains Louis Hagler, a retired internal medicine specialist in Oakland, Calif. "Noise above a certain level is perceived by the nervous system as a threat." The body responds to that threat with an outpouring of epinephrine and cortisol, the so-called stress hormones. "Your blood pressure goes up, your pulse rate goes up, there is a sudden outpouring of sugar into the bloodstream so the body is prepared to meet whatever threat there is in the environment."

If exposures are intermittent or rare, the body has the chance to return to normal. But if the exposure is unrelenting, the body doesn't have a chance to calm down, and blood pressure and heart rate may remain elevated, Hagler explains. That's why what seems like a mere annoyance can actually have long-term health effects. ...

http://salon.com/news/feature/2008/06/25/noise_pollution/

------------------------------

NOTE: Anyone can get a "free pass" to read Salon articles by viewing an online ad. Just wait for the "Enter Salon" link to appear. Be patient; sometimes there's a noticeable pause before that happens.

Quote of the day: Bob Geldof on e-mail

E-mail gives the illusion of progress even when nothing is happening.

-- Bob Geldof, musician and political activist (Band Aid, Live Aid)

Do cubicles shape character?

Found via Arts & Letters Daily:

The New Atlantis, Winter 2008

The Moral Life of Cubicles:
The Utopian Origins of Dilbert's Workspace

by David Franz

Few arenas can match the business office for its combination of humdrummery and world-shaping influence. Sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote of office workers, "Whatever history they have had is a history without events." The history of office technology seems especially uninspiring ... Max Weber saw the office's methods of organization, its rationality, and its disciplines as hallmarks of modern capitalism, making possible dramatic gains in efficiency and forever altering the economic and cultural landscape. Perhaps even more significant in our time, when millions of American workers spend most of their waking day in an office, is the sense that the organizational technologies of office life provide a kind of moral education, that offices shape character, that they create a certain kind of person. ...

Read the full article or download a PDF at:

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-moral-life-of-cubicles

In praise of librarians

Inside Higher Ed, November 16, 2005

IN PRAISE OF LIBRARIANS

As the roles of libraries and their keepers change, Terry Caesar wants academics to appreciate those who care for our books.

http://insidehighered.com/views/2005/11/16/caesar

Web users read 20-30% of words

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, May 6, 2008

On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/percent-text-read.html

Strunk and White said it best: Omit needless words!

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

Meanwhile, Nielsen notes that web pages are getting fatter, quoting two interesting observations from WebSiteOptimization:

1. Over the last 5 years, the average Web page grew from 94 KB to 312 KB: a growth rate of 82%/year.
   
   
2. Despite this obesity epidemic, observed response times for U.S. users with broadband decreased from 2.8 to 2.3 seconds per page (average across 40 big business sites) from 2006 to 2008.

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/average-web-page

Nielsen's comments:

1. First, let's remember that almost half of the Internet users still don't have broadband, particularly in rural areas. In fact, FarmersOnly.com explicitly decided to design for dial-up access.
   
   
2. While 2.3 seconds is better than 2.8, it's still 130% slower than the 1.0 seconds required for optimal user experience and a true sense of flow while navigating.
   
   
3. In the past, big images were the largest offender, but now response times are delayed by the inclusion of ever-more external objects, code snippets, and "widgets." Keep a lid on it. The biggest contributor to interactivity is still the ability to navigate fast and furiously.

To paraphrase Strunk & White: Omit needless code!

To subscribe to Jakob Nielsen's usability newsletter, send a blank e-mail to

join-alertbox AT laser DOT sparklist DOT com

More info about the Nielson Norman Group
http://www.nngroup.com/

A philosopher's 10 modern myths

Times Higher Education, April 24, 2008

In the first in a series in which academics range beyond their area of expertise, philosopher Simon Blackburn proffers his top ten modern myths.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=401547&encCode=53931485BC53187875JTBS737226611

Found via Arts & Letters Daily

Multitasking: The brain is not a CPU

More from Walter Kirn's "The Autumn of the Multitaskers" (The Atlantic Monthly, November 2007):

... Multitasking, a definition: "The attempt by human beings to operate like computers, often done with the assistance of computers." It begins by giving us more tasks to do, making each task harder to do, and dimming the mental powers required to do them. It finishes by making us forget exactly how on earth we did them (assuming we didn't give up, or "multi quit"), which makes them harder to do again.

... In the days of rudimentary chemistry, the mind was thought to be a beaker of swirling volatile essences. Then came classical physical mechanics, and the mind was regarded as a clocklike thing, with springs and wheels. Then it was steam-driven, maybe. A combustion chamber. Then came electricity and Freud, and it was a dynamo of polarized energies -- the id charged one way, the superego the other.

Now, in the heyday of the microchip, the brain is a computer. A CPU.

Except that it's not a CPU. It's whatever that thing is that's driven to misconstrue itself ... as a prototype ... of our latest marvel of technology. ...

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200711/multitasking

Multitasking is driving us crazy

The Autumn of the Multitaskers
by Walter Kirn, The Atlantic Monthly, November 2007

Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy. One man's odyssey through the nightmare of infinite connectivity.

... Through a variety of experiments, many using functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity, [scientists have] torn the mask off multitasking ...

... At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that [multitasking] requires -- the constant switching and pivoting -- energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we're supposed to be concentrating on. ...

... Even worse, certain studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy. ...

... multitasking slows our thinking. It forces us to chop competing tasks into pieces, set them in different piles, then hunt for the pile we're interested in, pick up its pieces, review the rules for putting the pieces back together, and then attempt to do so, often quite awkwardly. ... A brain attempting to perform two tasks simultaneously will, because of all the back-and-forth stress, exhibit a substantial lag in information processing. ...

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200711/multitasking

The art of doing something well

The Wall Street Journal, March 27, 2008, page D7

Brian C. Anderson's review of The Craftsman
by Richard Sennett (Yale University Press, 326 pages, $27.50)

In The Human Condition Hannah Arendt distinguished ... between man as a worker, thoughtlessly and amorally lost in his labor's object, and man as a maker of society and its institutions, a builder of life in common. For Arendt, the maker had it all over the worker, who was, in her view, basically a drudge.

Richard Sennett, Arendt's former student, thinks that his mentor's division is too sharply drawn, too contemptuous of practical life. In "The Craftsman he compellingly explores the universe of skilled work, where "the desire to do a job well for its own sake" still flourishes. ...

Read the full review at:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120658371177467629.html?mod=2_1167_1

Found via Arts & Letters Daily

Quote of the day: Calvin Coolidge

Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshiped.

-- Calvin Coolidge

I wonder if good ol' "Silent Cal" would say the same about technology?

Quote of the day: George Santayana

All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with;
all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong,
or deny to be possible.

-- George Santayana, philosopher (1863-1952)

Curbing bad behavior online

On March 2008, Josh Fischman wrote for The Chronicle of Higher Education's blog Wired Campus:

There is a growing sense that bad student behavior online -- pirating music files, posting drunken photos on their Facebook page, passing along malicious gossip about other students on the Web -- has roots in earlier childhood, when they were not taught that, even online, there are boundaries.

Now [Tanya Byron,] a British psychologist, asked by her government to review how parents and children are affected by new technology, has weighed in with some support for this notion.

http://www.dfes.gov.uk/byronreview/

Quote of the day: Miss Peggy Lee

I learned courage from Buddha, Jesus, Lincoln, Einstein, and Cary Grant.

-- Miss Peggy Lee (1920-2002), quoted in the epigraph of Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem

Teaching technique a tad tired?

The Chronicle of Higher Education Colloquy, February 21, 2008

Read a chat transcript with Barbara Gross Davis, assistant vice provost for undergraduate education at the University of California at Berkeley. She oversees the Office of Educational Development, the campus's faculty-development unit, and eight academic-support services for students. The second edition of her 1993 book, Tools for Teaching, which will be published by Jossey-Bass this year.

http://chronicle.com/live/2008/02/davis/

... Question from Beth Dailey, Nicolet College: Would you talk about alternatives to face-to-face office hours? Have you found online chat and instant messaging effective ways to communicate with students?

Barbara Gross Davis: Actually it is important to have face-to-face contact with students to learn more about them, to help students feel engaged in the course and to make them feel recognized as an individual, particularly in large classes. Online chat and IM are not alternatives but supplements. Online technologies are best for specific questions but do not allow for the sometimes the rather rambling conversations that can produce the best learning.

... Comment from Denise Blumenthal, WGBH, Boston's Public TV:

Are any of you aware of "Getting Results," a free online course for teaching in community colleges? We designed it for adjuncts, but it is really "Teaching 101" for anyone teaching at the college level. It is filled with videos, readings, discussion questions ...

http://www.league.org/gettingresults/

What high schoolers don't know

On February 27, 2008, the editorial board of The New York Times wrote:

In [Common Core's recent telephone] survey of 1,200 17-year-olds:

• Almost one-quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler.
• More than one-quarter thought Christopher Columbus sailed after 1750.
• One-third did not know that the Bill of Rights protects freedom of religion and speech.
• Just 52 percent knew that the novel 1984 is about a dictatorship in which citizens are watched to stamp out all individuality
• Only 50 percent knew that in the Bible, Job is known for his patience in suffering.

http://theboard.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/is-our-children-learning-maybe-not/

http://www.commoncore.org/_docs/CCreport_stillatrisk.pdf

See Slate.com for the multiple-choice questions.

http://www.slate.com/id/2185486/entry/0/

What behaviors satisfy library chat users?

Nahyun Kwon and Vicki L. Gregory (Winter 2007). The Effects of Librarians' Behavioral Performance on User Satisfaction in Chat Reference Services. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 47 (2): 137–148.

Interesting study which analyzed 422 chat reference transaction transcripts and corresponding user surveys obtained from a public library system. Would any of this be useful for other faculty holding virtual office hours? I don't know.

"Satisfaction was statistically significantly higher when reference staff showed the following six behaviors ...

1. used the patron's name during the reference interview;
2. communicated more receptively and listened more carefully;
3. searched with or for the patron;
4. provided pointers;
5. asked the patron whether the question was completely answered; and
6. asked the patron to come back if they needed further assistance. ...
   

... Furthermore, when examining the behavioral predictors of user satisfaction, five of the 10 RUSA behaviors were found to be significant predictors of user satisfaction. They were:

1. asking whether the question was answered completely;
   
2. offering information sources;
   
3. asking patrons to come back when they need further assistance;
   
4. searching information sources with or for the patrons; and
   
5. listening to questions in a cordial and receptive manner."

Notice that using the patron's name didn't significantly improve user satisfaction. In most F2F reference transactions, you wouldn't know the patron's name. Although there is a place for it in the QuestionPoint system our campus library uses, quite a few patrons do not complete that field.

http://rusq.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/47n2/PDFs/kwon_gregory.pdf

What’s better than free Star Trek?

Posted at Get Rich Slowly on 22 Feb 2008:

... CBS is offering every episode of the original Star Trek series for free via streaming video. ... Other classic shows available for viewing include:

• The Twilight Zone
• Hawaii Five-O
• MacGyver

http://www.cbs.com/classics/star_trek/video/video.php

http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2008/02/22/daily-links-true-geek-edition/

Quote of the day: Susan B. Anthony

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.

-- Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906)

Dalí was above the cliché of Surrealism

The Smart Set, 4 January 2008

The Dalí Shtick
By Morgan Meis

Salvador Dalí was skating on thin ice. It was a shtick and he was doing his shtick. He would open his eyes wide and give the patented Dalí stare. Surrealism. Granted, Andre Breton was never exactly a paragon of personal dignity but at least there was something at stake in the early days. By the end, Dalí was nothing but a parody of the thing he'd created of himself.

But it isn't all crap, and that's the revelation at the heart of the new exhibition "Dali: Painting & Film" (now leaving the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for St. Petersburg, Florida, and then MoMA this summer). Somewhere between the posing and the vamping and the recycling of tired imagery he created something. ...

http://thesmartset.com/article/article01040801.aspx

Lowell Monke: The Human Touch

Education Next, 4(4), Fall 2004

The Human Touch
By Lowell Monke

In the rush to place a computer on every desk, schools are neglecting intellectual creativity and personal growth.

http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext/3259156.html

A PDF copy can be downloaded from the website.

Good teaching boosts achievement

Time Magazine, February 13, 2008

How to Make Great Teachers
By Claudia Wallis

We never forget our best teachers -- those who imbued us with a deeper understanding or an enduring passion, the ones we come back to visit years after graduating, the educators who opened doors and altered the course of our lives. ...

... It would be wonderful if we knew more about teachers such as these and how to multiply their number. How do they come by their craft? What qualities and capacities do they possess? Can these abilities be measured? Can they be taught? Perhaps above all: How should excellent teaching be rewarded so that the best teachers -- the most competent, caring and compelling -- remain in a profession known for low pay, low status and soul-crushing bureaucracy?

... Even as politicians push to hold schools and their faculty members accountable as never before for student learning, the nation faces a shortage of teaching talent. About 3.2 million people teach in U.S. public schools, but, according to projections by economist William Hussar at the National Center for Education Statistics, the nation will need to recruit an additional 2.8 million over the next eight years owing to baby-boomer retirement, growing student enrollment and staff turnover -- which is especially rapid among new teachers. ... Research suggests that a good teacher is the single most important factor in boosting achievement, more important than class size, the dollars spent per student or the quality of textbooks and materials. ...

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1713174,00.html

Sports Illustrated Road Trip to Purdue

Someone at work has a print version posted on their office door.

http://si.cnn.com/2008/sioncampus/01/14/road.trip.purdue/

Rethinking remedial education

On Jan 29, 2008, Inside Higher Ed Daily Update wrote:

Rethinking remedial education

In statewide effort, community colleges in California experiment with new models for "basic skills" instruction and student services.

http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/29/california

Typography's influence

The Boston Globe, January 27, 2008

What font says 'Change'?
by Sam Berlow & Cyrus Highsmith

Typography can subtly or boldly define a company, product, or person. Whether it is Best Buy's big, bold, screaming signs or the sweet, elegant script on a wine label, the type talks to us, the reader. The logos of the presidential candidates are no exception. ...

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/01/27/what_font_says_change/

I wish the type designers had given the names of all the fonts they discuss.

Do machines think?

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.

-- B.F. Skinner, Contingencies of Reinforcement, 1969