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At my company (less in my unit of it), teaching is basically treated as a tax you have to pay to do your research, and faculty are hired and promoted for research and encouraged to avoid this tax where possible; indeed, one of our principal recruitment gestures is a reduced teaching load for the first [...]
Archive for the ‘Teaching’ Category
December 20th, 2011
August 26th, 2011
Category: Handbasket, world going to hell in, Teaching
Professor who closed the laptop of a student surfing the web during class acquitted of battery-and fired.
May 16th, 2011
Category: Teaching, Technology and Society
Last week, I gave grand rounds at a small hospital in Northern California, and they filmed it for medical staff who couldn’t attend in person. A few days later I attended a drug policy conference where every talk and every comment from the floor was filmed. My university has a deal with YouTube to post [...]
April 17th, 2011
In my freshman year I took the introductory chemistry course for people who had had some chemistry, and as it happened, that year William Lipscomb took it over from a popular prof who was on sabbatical. His long line of PhDs (three more Nobels, uh-huh) and colleagues will be writing remembrances of his scientific contributions, [...]
April 6th, 2011
Category: Handbasket, world going to hell in, Teaching
Student refuses to stop surfing the web during class. Professor shuts her laptop. Result: professor sued, arrested, suspended.
August 14th, 2010
If one shining example of everything going right can redeem an awful couple of weeks, this is it. You have to read the whole story and watch the video. Just go do it and come back here (or not; what I have to say about it will be at best a few flowers strewn before [...]
August 9th, 2010
A colleague shared the following priceless reflections, a letter to Chris Edley from July 28: Dear Dean Edley: I’ve been following with interest what you’re saying in the press about UC online education. I teach Statistics N21, the first online course at Berkeley to be approved by COCI [the UCB faculty Committee on Courses of Instruction].  It [...]
August 7th, 2010
My colleague Chris Edley is out in front of the push to get Berkeley in the on-line education business . Kevin Carey and Matt Yglesias discuss whether the new product should start upscale, like the Tesla sports car as a pilot product , or downmarket, like a knockoff LV bag that holds just as much [...]
June 8th, 2010
California Teachers Association president David A. Sanchez makes the strongest case he can for Tom Torlakson in the race for Superintendent of Public Instruction. Draw your own conclusions.
