July 27, 2009, 12:45 pm
By Robert Talbert
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 words, it sounds like the session will be about how to get your college’s upper administration up and running with blogging and tweeting. I’m curious to see what Dalton makes of this, because his home institution seems to have embraced blogging and Twitter at a scale you don’t normally see from a university. Even the chancellor tweets.
I’d love to see more college administrators blogging or twittering, using their real names, making no secret of their institutions, and writing honestly about their successes and struggles in the work that they do. There’s no faster track to giving higher education a measure of transparency that it badly needs…
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July 27, 2009, 11:37 am
By Robert Talbert
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 both Thursday and Friday and there are some good speakers lined up for all the sessions. The Higher Education Summit will have talks on topics ranging from Facebook-enabled classrooms to how to get your college’s Chancellor to Twitter.
If you’re coming, leave a note in the comments and maybe we can turn it into a meet-up.
September 5, 2008, 7:42 am
By Robert Talbert
Apologies for the long time between posts. The semester is in full swing and it’s a busy one — 14 hour teaching load, chairing Promotion and Tenure, 17 new advisees, and two proposals to finish before the first week of October (one curricular, one grant-related) — and I think I’m only now beginning to get back in rhythm.
Anyway, I just wanted to draw your attention to two noteworthy edublogs that have recently arrived on the scene:
- Learning Curve is a new edublog by Karen Francisco under the aegis of the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette. Karen was the reporter who interviewed me for this piece on textbook prices and open-source textbooks.
- Dropout Nation is not a new blog but is recently back from a long hiatus. RiShawn Biddle is the blogger there — a former Indianapolis Star columnist whose articles on education were, and are, particularly hard-hitting and insightful.
Enjoy them both.
July 3, 2008, 5:50 am
By Robert Talbert
March 8, 2008, 10:23 am
By Robert Talbert
Evidently, I owe much of the traffic on this blog to people doing Google searches on Peyton Manning:
I’m not anywhere near the top hit on this search, and I’m sure that the fact I live in the Indianapolis area has nothing to do with this. Is this some kind of strange spamming scheme?
December 6, 2007, 8:48 pm
By Robert Talbert
If you’re a college student with a blog, and you want some exposure with rather a lot more financial incentive than putting your URL here, then you might consider the College Blogger Contest 2008 sponsored by the America’s Future Foundation. The contest is open to all undergraduate and graduate students 25 years old or younger and carries a prize of $10,000 for the winner. The deadline for submissions is December 31. It appears that submitted blogs need to have a conservative or libertarian slant.
If you’re a blogger and fit this description, go to the link above and check out the full list of rules and sign up. Sounds like a good opportunity.
December 6, 2007, 8:29 am
By Robert Talbert
The comment on yesterday’s post from Matt, an undergrad in math and computer science at Carnegie-Mellon and blogger at Relatively Speaking, reminded me of just how much I appreciate blogs written by students. As a professor, my job on the “micro” scale is to design and teach mathematics courses and do stuff to help the college operate. But my vocation on the “macro” scale is to help students to think well and to chart their course through life. I like to think that blogging is an extension of that vocation beyond my everyday campus role, and it always excites me to be able to interact with students like Matt who are working hard at the business of learning.
So I’d like to ask any student blogger — especially undergraduates but also high school/homeschool students and graduate students — who is actively maintaining a blog that seriously reflects on their studies and their lives to…
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October 8, 2007, 11:00 am
By Robert Talbert
I’ve just created a “tumblelog“, which is like a blog only much more freeform and less oriented towards articles. You can find it here. I’m just messing around with this idea, using the tumblelog (I already dislike that term) to gather snippets of stuff that I find interesting but not quite worthy of a blog post — raw links to articles and web sites, videos, audio, and so on which I just want to gather and share but not comment on.
There’s an RSS feed at the tumblelog to which you can subscribe if you’re interested, and right now I have it set so that the RSS feed for Casting Out Nines gets sent automatically to the tumblelog, making the tumblelog a one-stop shop for all the stuff I post. (You still have to come here for comments, though.)
Enjoy.
October 3, 2007, 8:11 pm
By Robert Talbert
I’ve just made a major discovery: WordPress.com blogs, like this one, allow you to typeset LaTeX directly in your blog posts. For example:
\(x = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 – 4ac}}{2a}\)
You can put in LaTeX in the comment fields, too. Here’s the FAQ entry that explains it all. I’m appreciating my switch to WordPress.com more and more each day.
I found this fact out in a comment left by Terence Tao on the blog of Timothy Gowers, both of whom are not only Fields Medal-winning mathematicians but also WordPress.com bloggers.
September 25, 2007, 10:08 am
By Robert Talbert
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