September 30, 2013 An Open Letter to Our College President on the Digitization of Learning From The Cheapskate Intellectual Dear President, Thank you for being a thoughtful leader and serious colleague who has invited us to wrestle with the challenges and opportunities facing us and all other colleges these days. At your State of the […]
Read moreIn the country of frac-sand mining.
Yesterday, I took an all-day bus tour (sponsored by and including many Allamakee County Protectors) to see frac-sand mining up close in Trempeleau and Chippewa Counties, Wisconsin. In our group were filmmakers, writers, lawyers, water-quality specialists, Winneshiek County Protectors, journalists, farmers, geologists, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, a long-distance hiker, and ordinary citizens from […]
Read moreMOOCs in Citizenville.
What happens when you use technology to “serve people” by taking people and their physical presence in particular places – and thus their sense of responsibility and relationship to one another and to that place – out of the picture entirely? One result is MOOCs, or “Massively Open Online Courses,” packages of videotaped lectures and […]
Read moreBlack Friday.
Black as in Iowa soil, that is — its first couple inches just touched with frost, covering golden potatoes underneath. The cold came at last, the day after Thanksgiving in this unusually warm fall. Time to harvest everything that was left in the garden — carrots, potatoes, collards, beets — before the ground freezes for […]
Read moreCommon ground: politics, water, and life.
Checking my email on what is going to be my last full morning in Alabama for a while, I found some very troubling news: fracking may be coming to our beautiful little corner of northeast Iowa. You might say it’s technically not fracking, since the proposed mine in Allamakee County would be for what’s called […]
Read moreSomebody made this: who?
This morning, I took my first-ever pottery class, in the spacious studio in our college’s arts center, with a generous colleague, George, and a large group of students, several of whom had been in my classes before. I’m here on sabbatical, I said, to learn, just like you are. And the relief of being among […]
Read moreDiets, labels, and a local life.
Some great conversations with my yoga teacher, a nutritionist, and other good friends and advisors lately — along with traveling, walking, and experiencing a bad blood-sugar crash in foreign places — have set me one stage deeper on a path of reinvention from the inside out: in addition to biking a lot during this fall’s […]
Read morePolar bears on a Coke can.
Today, just before Christmas, finishing up my grading and trying to cut down on the caffeine that’s one of the many things spiking my blood pressure this month, I picked up a can of Coke from the cooler in our student union. Those who knew me in grad school, when I drank about a case […]
Read moreMakes me wanna holler.
Looking at this video makes me wanna holler. College students peacefully occupy a public space. Policemen ordered in by the university chancellor demand they leave. Students remain where they are, linking arms and bowing their heads. A policeman whips out a can of pepper spray and then marches down the line of huddled, bowed, […]
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