Last week, Inside Higher Ed posted a very short article about Purdue University, which investigated the relationship between use of the campus gym and student GPA. The study found that students who visited the gym roughly once a week throughout the semester had higher GPAs, and the gym is now seeking to prove “whether there …
First, if you haven’t already read Nicholas Schiller’s excellent post on assessment, go do that. I can wait. Done? Great. Let me just say how well he articulated how “assessment” can be a loaded term, and how our profession needs to be mindful of how we approach it. Nick paraphrased another colleague, who had said …
One time I heard an anecdote, likely apocryphal, about a meeting of allied leaders during World War 2. Roosevelt was having everyone drink martinis, which spurred a discussion about the appropriate proportion of gin to vermouth. Churchill poured himself a measure of gin, then, while looking at the French delegation, waved the bottle of vermouth …
I’ve been working on a research project for the last six months with a few colleagues on my campus. Although the paper is nominally about graduate students in a Teacher Education program, a lot of my thinking has gravitated toward the notion of “lifelong learning.” There are lots of definitions and concepts associated with that …
Finally back at work after a week away, trying to decipher 15 or so pages of notes from Library Instruction West. There are so many new things I heard and learned, and I’m sure I’ll come back to other specifics later, but here are some of main themes I observed in the sessions I attended …
I grew up in Florida, where one old adage was that “the south is a place, the north is just a direction.” I guess the idea was that while there are regional identities, they’re much more centered on specific cities and states, and that the south, uniquely, has a wide-reaching character. And I mostly subscribed …
This is the first entry on my new website, the creation of which has been a strange endeavor. For several years, I eschewed having too much of an online presence, preferring to focus on “real life,” rather than whatever the internet is. I felt, and in many ways still feel, that online discourse is inherently …