Two years ago, there was a big push on my campus to adopt a new class schedule, one that regularized the start time of evening classes and created a new Monday-Wednesday option for courses. The totally predictable wholly unforeseeable effect, as I’ve noted before, was to depopulate MWF (or just F) classes. It turns out that if students have the option to build their schedule around a shorter week, many of them will do so. And so many of us who used to teach MWF classes dutifully recalibrated our syllabuses for the new MW reality.
Yesterday’s big push on campus is, of course, to “offer more Friday classes in the fall.”
Can it be spring break yet?
Here are this week’s links:
- Craig Mod, a former designer at Flipboard, discusses “How We Will Read”: I find I struggle with other “social” reading applications because they require excessive amount of work to get the books into their system. I am tremendously lazy. If the social component of reading doesn’t happen seamlessly with my Kindle habits, it’s very unlikely I’ll engage it regularly.
- Karen Davis explains using the text-comparison tool Juxta as a way to reflect on one’s own writing: An idea was born: to create a teaching module (yeah, those things that textbook companies produce that no one actually uses…) using drafts of my own work and Juxta to demonstrate the whole writing process. (Via Amy Earhart)
- At Rands in Repose, a great post about faux-busyness and setting aside an hour every day to make things: Other than spending time with my family, my absolute favorite time of the week is Saturday morning. I sleep in a little bit, walk upstairs, start the coffee process, and wander over to the computer. There’s a Dropbox folder titled “Latest Rands Articles” and right this moment there are 65 articles in progress there. After a brief stumble of the Internet, a precious time begins. I have precisely the right music on, in the center of my screen is a wall of words, and in that moment I’m decidedly not busy, I’m not working – I am building a thing and I need this time every single day.
- At Practically Efficient, Eddie offers up “A Workflow Epic: How I Use My Mac To Teach Over The Web”. It’s kind of unexcerptable, but he lays out the suite of tools he’s cobbled together to do screencasts, mark up PDFs, and much more.
- And in another useful, but somewhat unexcerptable post, Laura Trouille (at Women in Astronomy) offers “Job Interview Advice” (via Kelle at AstroBetter).
In this week’s video, Jason Priem discusses altmetrics, total impact, and the decoupled journal:
Have a great weekend!
Photo “Four Mile Lake Winter Trail” by Flickr user ex_magician / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0
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