From Medium and beyond — Higher Ed is all aflutter about AI and what and how we will teach and evaluate learning when bots are a standard writing tool. It took years to encourage students to use grammar-checkers and citation-generators without calling it “cheating.” How do we teach the craft of writing? Or is it…

Really about reading this time! This column has not been what I intended when I started it in June. Weekly, I said. Reading, I said. And then my writing time was taken up with a book project. And my reading time was taken up with my day job. I barely…

What to do if it happened to you. — I have been hosting my newsletter on Revue for about a year now and was happy with the platform. But Revue is a Twitter product, and when Musk took over as Chief Twit, he killed Revue. As of January 18, 2023, there will no longer be a Revue newsletter option. …

Something’s gotta give. — Sorry, friends. I set out to write a weekly column as a way to keep my hand in on Medium when life got crazy elsewhere. Then life got even crazier, and I let even this slide. Here’s where I am — about halfway through…

The Messy Briefcase to the rescue! — “Absentminded Professor,” my father called me when I was a child. Even then, I would forget things I needed to take to school with me. Now that I really am a professor, the absentmindedness hasn’t improved. I just have a million strategies that help me look like I’ve got my…

From a different porch — We spent a lovely week at North Topsail Beach last week. We enjoyed lazy days watching the waves, stuffing ourselves with fresh seafood, and catching up on reading. It felt amazing to have the energy to read with some depth and to immerse myself in fictional worlds, so this week’s…

The life question I’m still asking — When I was 15, I started my first job in a library. I shelved books, read to small children in story hour, and helped run a theater group for Middle Schoolers. More than 40 years later, I’m still working in a library, now a library director at a small college…