The College Library: Old School or Cutting Edge?

College Library: Old School or Cutting Edge?

BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL As colleges lay out their strategies to become more sustainable over the long term, there are uncertainties that can dramatically affect their abilities to do so. Some are programmatic, based upon unpredictable market conditions. Others rely on personnel decisions that shape an institution’s ability to be both flexible and creative. A…

The Professor, Penmanship, and Online Education

This summer I am teaching online, in part because many students prefer to take classes online. Summer is the time for mischief, experimentation and creation—there is just something about that added sunlight, all sorts of plants I know not the names of in bloom everywhere—it just makes you want to try something new. In my…

Tech Out, Chalk In, Well Almost

This is not so much in response to Mary Flanagan’s  essay, “The Classroom as Arcade,” recently published by Inside Higher Ed,  which features a vivid observation of a student in class who “check[ed] out from a class he likes” to play a role-playing game on an electronic device while others “openly engaged with their Facebook pages,”…