Monthly Archives: July 2009
What are “essential teaching skills”?
In my last post, I expressed incredulity at Pat Rogan’s statement that by limiting education degrees to no more than 30 hours of pedagogy courses, the state of Indiana would be “put[ting] educators without essential teaching skills into classrooms”. I brought … Continue reading
Filed under Teaching
Big changes coming for Indiana teacher licensing?
Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett is announcing today a plan to overhaul the state’s system for teacher licensure. The announcement is here, and there are three PDF’s linked at the bottom of that page that go into more … Continue reading
Filed under Education, High school, Higher ed, Life in academia, Teaching
The blogging VPAA?
I was thinking over the session coming up at Blog Indiana by John Oak Dalton titled “Chancellor 2.0″ which promises to address “existing and emerging obstacles of CEO-grade context” [sic? Was that supposed to be "content"?] for Twitter. In other … Continue reading
Filed under Academic freedom, Blogging, Higher ed, Life in academia, Social software, Technology, Tenure, Twitter, Web 2.0
Blogging Indiana
Just a programming note: I’l be attending the Higher Education Summit at the Blog Indiana 2009 social media conference on Thursday, August 14. Blog Indiana is held in the Informatics building on the campus of IUPUI. The main conference runs … Continue reading
Filed under Blog announcements, Blogging, Social software, Technology, Twitter, Web 2.0
A mathematician behind the moon landing
In the wake of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, here’s a nice piece from the Vanderbilt University News Network about Richard Arenstorf, professor emeritus of mathematics, who solved a major piece of the theoretical puzzle that made … Continue reading
Filed under Life in academia, Math
Google Reader issues
Two of my last three posts have shown up in Google Reader being completely illegible. For some reason some of the text is being bunched up on the left side of the post. I don’t know why it’s doing this, … Continue reading
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Filed under Blog announcements, Casting Out Nines, Technical difficulties
A hostage to my OS?
A comment in my last post raised a point about using Mac OS X or Windows, as opposed to using Linux, that gets raised a lot in these kinds of discussions but which simply isn’t true. The point was: Go … Continue reading
Filed under Apple, Technology
Why I am not a Linux user any more
For the last couple of days I’ve been trying to install some new software on the Ubuntu Linux machine that my kids use in their playroom. Being able to get a real computer for the kids for about $75 (about … Continue reading
Filed under Apple, Linux, Technology
MATLAB for the masses
The upcoming academic year will contain a number of new projects for me that are going to be quite exciting. I’ve twittered about one of these projects recently, and each time I do so, I get replies from folks wanting … Continue reading
Filed under Computer algebra systems, Math, MATLAB, Technology
On not paying for your kids’ college
Meagan Francis has this “bad parent” column today in which she confesses that she has no plans whatsoever to pay her five kids’ ways through college. Snippet: Our plan is to assist each of our children with lots of support … Continue reading
Filed under Education, Family, Higher ed, Life in academia, Student culture
