Aw, Professor: Bloat

 In honor of small universities with more vice presidents than a person has fingers.



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Aw, Professor: Campus Computing

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 In honor of instructional support systems that interfere with instruction. As with many memes in this series, this one has been percolating for some while. At the beginning of the Fall 2024 semester, however, it comes to a head as I hear the frustration of a growing number of colleagues.  Those who teach are increasingly assessed and managed by those who do not -- and none of that assessment asks US what would allow us to be more effective. In short it would be this: leave our teaching tools alone. From email to blackboard to simply viewing a web site, everything we touch comes with more features and less reliability -- more safeguards and less access.  I am no Luddite in this arena. I was the first person to offer a fully online course on my campus -- and the first to win an online teaching award, and the second. I taught workshops statewide, and I consulted for Blackboard. And yet ...
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Aw, Professor: Fair Trade

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Aw, Professor: Mosquitos

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  In honor of reactive management styles. Mosquitos carry dread diseases worldwide, most notably diseases endemic in the tropics, such as malaria and dengue. When I travel to the tropics, I pay a lot of attention to those diseases and the critters that carry them. Where I live in southern New England, we pay attention to mosquitos only when a case of Eastern Equine Encephalitis is diagnosed -- EEE or Triple-E. Then we go from zero to overkill in a matter of days. Parks are closed and aerial bombardment of our towns commences.  Boards of health try to communicate both that the sprays are safe and that we should stay indoors when they are being sprayed. Hmmm. They also encourage what Brazilians call "meia e meia" practices, which means staying indoors at dusk and dawn. The Portuguese phrase literally means "half and half" or "six and six" because in the Amazon, mosquitos are most active at those hours, and Brazilian Portuguese refers to six on the clock as m...
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