At its 2005 national conference ACRL took a bold leadership role in championing the idea of online learning by offering a virtual conference that ran simultaneously with its physical conference. I had the pleasure of taking part in that virtual conference by presenting the same program we had offered the day before in front of [...]

I tend to be in agreement with most of the opinion pieces that show up over at The Irascible Professor. That’s probably because most of them are written by curmudgeony old academics like myself. But even I had to raise an eyebrow when I read “You Can’t Take That Away From Me“, the latest commentary [...]

A Simple Blog Not for everyone perhaps but I’m keeping an eye on Laws of Simplicity, a new blog by John Maeda (MIT Media Lab) that is based on his new book The Laws of Simplicity. The book focuses on Maeda’s 10 laws of simplicity, and the blog expands on these laws as well as [...]

It’s crazy season for instruction – the month when you have to keep trying to remember what day of the week it is. Is this the day I teach a first term seminar, a psychology methods course, a section of invertebrate biology, and art history, or is it that tomorrow? It can be thrilling, and [...]

The first paragraph of Stephen Downes’ essay titled “Half an Hour: How to Write Articles and Essays Quickly and Expertly” struck a chord with me because he shares how colleagues frequently ask how he can write so much over a continuous period – while he also does a fair number of other things – like [...]