Every educator needs to read "The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster before the start of next semester.

I'm putting together my Fall course, which needs an overhaul, and going back to Dee Fink's "Designing Courses for Significant Learning" for guidance as I've done for the last 15+ years. In 2024, its advice is simple and old-school -- in a way I wish we could get back to.

Scratch an article about "my choice of teaching method is academic freedom" and you'll find an "in defense of the college lecture" article.

Working on a new article about student evaluations of teaching (SETs) and feeling a little spicy about it. #highereducation

Here's another fun fact about trying to analyze exported Blackboard gradebooks: Sometimes numerical gradebook entries show up in R as numerical data, and sometimes as character data, and there's no pattern for which data type you'll get.

High school GPA is not nearly as reliable of a predictor of "college readiness" or 4-6 year college retention as people think it is.

One of my biggest peeves with Blackboard is how, when you download a gradebook, it adds a bunch of useless text info into the column names. Makes it 1000x harder to analyze the data because you have to go nuts with regexes just to get these back to something simple.

One year ago I wrote the following in my journal and I still believe it. "Around here" means my social media network but could apply more broadly.

Grading isn't much fun, but it doesn't have to drag us down. At Intentional Academia today, I offer you the Payoff Principle -- a way of applying #GTD principles to grading that makes it less of a drag. https://intentionalacademia.substack.com/p/grading-intentionally-using-the-payoff

Following up on last week's four rules for meetings, here are four MORE rules for making meetings with online participation work well. https://rtalbert.org/four-rules-for-hybrid-meetings/