Category Archives: Academic

Ask a stupid question, get a stupid educational system

I’ve spent the past few days reading Clifford Hill’s work on how children interpret questions on reading tests, and I can’t help but be struck by the comparisons to what Ethan is writing about his students in Cameroon. Hill demonstrates again and again that children generate their answers not just from the text of the […]

A thought about core curricula

The genetic biologist who has written an open letter to the head of SUNY Albany, on the occasion of his cutting of their French, Italian, Russian, theater, and classics departments, has gotten attention from a number of my friends today. He argues eloquently that science without the humanities becomes soulless and misguided; he illustrates with […]

ProQuest, Dissertations, and Creative Commons Licensing: An Open Letter

Oh hi, future tenure committee!

Publicly Available Documents

In the final hours of revisions to my dissertation, it occurred to me that I probably really needed to check with the blogger whose site name I was using in my title, to make sure that was OK with him. I did, and he said yes, he was flattered.

The URL Problem

Internet literate people use URLs to figure out where they are online. They use them to judge the accuracy of a website, figure out who is probably writing it, and determine how to interpret the discussion on it. Internet illiterate people, by contrast, don’t make use of URLs, much less understand what “URL” means or […]