Hebrew Bible and Christian Scriptures

So 2009 was a pretty good year – not nearly as productive as I would have hoped (as usual),but full of a lot of good things too. I’ve now been with the ATL for a full year – and what awonderful year it’s been! I also got to end the year by celebrating my little [...]

It feels like a little like a scene from a classic 50’s SF movie.  There’s a big oscilloscope in the center of the frame. On the screen, two distinct sine waves. Someone turns a dial, then another one, and the two sine waves move together into phase. Then the next plot point appears. I’d gotten an [...]

Jon Udell directed me to a very interesting Seb Paquet blog post today, “The Fate of the Incompetent Teacher in the YouTube Era.” I read Seb’s post with great admiration. Seb tells a disheartening story of his own education that resonates with some of my own experiences. To take but one minor example, as an [...]

Let me try to elucidate that metaphor. The 12/21-12/28 New Yorker has a fascinating story on stoves. Stoves, it turns out, are of the utmost importance for reasons of public health and climate change. The stoves in question are chiefly the wood-burning kind used in the Third World, that is, when stoves are used there at [...]

Sales of e-books are surging, and the voices of those moaning at the bar (cf. Tennyson) are getting louder too. You’d think the Kindle police were going to knock on our doors and confiscate all the printed bits of paper we own. Sometimes the laments are more nuanced and playful: witness Dolen Perkins-Valdez’ puckish yet [...]

(By the way, I firmly believe we need to include “poignance” as an essential analytical and expressive skill, particularly for scholars.) So I wrote, nearly a year ago. One commenter wanted me to elaborate on that aside. What did I mean? Here’s a little more context: And so back to education. Are our students not universes within [...]

I was very fortunate this fall to be asked to interview Larry Lessig for the EDUCAUSE Now podcast series, produced by Gerry Bayne. Gerry produced a teaser for my piece as well as a full-length feature interview segment. He was also kind enough to supply me with the raw audio of the entire telephone interview I conducted with [...]

This time, as it has several times before, the Thanksgiving season came with mourning, too. Wednesday I learned that Leslie Jarmon had passed away the night before, on November 24. The news shook me. I’d had no idea Leslie was sick. I had followed her progress with a major grant to develop areas in Second [...]

I’ve got 389 tweets with the #lilly09 hashtag from last week’s Lilly Conference on College Teaching. I estimate that a little over 300 of those are mine. The rest are responses, queries, retweets, encouragement. No doubt a few are unaccounted for because in the heat of the moment I forgot to append the hashtag. Nevertheless, [...]

Given that my dissertation research focuses on some possible cellular mechanisms of autism, I try to keep an eye out for not only new research, but also more popular references in the media. One of my biggest pet peeves on the issue is the grassroots movement holding to the idea that vaccines in young kids [...]