As I’m teaching four classes this semester, something I haven’t done for a while, I figured it was time to up my organizational game just a little… and give website readers a sense of how I organize my classes along with the tools I use. Tools: What Goes With Me Into the Classroom As my…
Read More Setting up classes for a new semester: My processIn other words: Did I waste a lot of time? I don’t think the project I described in a previous post was a waste of time at all — there are two ways in which I think of the project: The mere act of going through the abstracts pointed out to me the articles that…
Read More Followup: Why bother to have abstracts for all my journal articles?I believe this to be true, but don’t take my word for it… the National Bureau of Economic Research just published a study that found that double majoring is good for future careers and career earnings. Here’s the abstract: We study how human capital diversification, in the form of double majoring, affects the response of…
Read More Polymaths are protected from economic shocksOne of the complaints that my students hear from their STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) friends is that communication is such an “easy” discipline. In the first week or two of my Communication Theory and Theory and Research classes, we pretty quickly work on refuting that notion. We talk about how even the “simplest”…
Read More Polymaths and the Communication DisciplineAn accessibility rant courtesy of my Faculty Focus email So who doesn’t want a syllabus that students will actually read and use throughout the semester? I think most professors — whether creative or not-so-creative, or those who see themselves primarily as teachers and those who don’t — hate to get the questions that are already…
Read More Want a cool syllabus that’s accessible…I’m not going to rehash here the myriad debates about what Artificial Intelligence (AI) will do to education and colleges. There’s been enough electrons and ink spilled about that, with more to come. I want to focus on one aspect that ties in well with the typical academic’s tendency toward imposter syndrome — the fear…
Read More FONK, not FOMOToday happens to be a “work from home” day, given the heat in Georgia and that my pressing matters can be dealt with by email.[1]I say this fully recognizing the blessing of having a job where I can do my work remotely. Not everyone is so fortunate. Email is the joy and curse of many…
Read More What to do on a “it’s too hot to work in the office” dayOr what happened when I spent an afternoon reviewing all of the classes in my department…. The perfect pre-Christmas nerdy project: if I could reorganize all of our classes with different numbers, how would I do it? And why do it in the first place? The answer to the latter question actually comes from something…
Read More Making course numbers mean somethingI think that those of us who are in academia know that we’ve chosen this career because we simultaneously possess and/or don’t possess certain qualities. I’m blessed that I am able to process lots of information and find ways to organize that information. I’m also blessed that I find thinking about abstract matters to be…
Read More A more serious reflection: the cost of academia