The Emerging Scholars Blog

What tips/ideas do you have for InterVarsity’s National Graduate & Faculty Ministry Staff Team Members in Using Social Media Appropriately and Effectively to Grow Communities?  Now’s your opportunity to give input.  I’m leading a seminar on the topic at our April Team Meetings.  Here’s some material I’m seeking to address:

1. How do we use social media appropriately to
   1. build community?  Note:  How does social media influence our/your definition of community or the various forms of community in which we find ourselves?  The seminar will take the direction of building local, face-to-face campus communities, but I’m also interested in the other forms of community, such one finds in the Emerging Scholars Network.
   2. invite others to engage with our community?
   3. engage others with ideas we are discussing in our communities?
2. What are some do’s and don’ts for healthy, appropriate and effective use of technology?
3. What’s available? What’s changing? How do we make decisions?
4. How do we make decisions about the use of technology when engaging with audiences of different generations in our ministry?  Note:  Please don’t skip.  Due to the overall conference theme, it has particular relevance.  :-)  Feel free to also share How you make decisions about the use of technology when engaging with audiences of different generations in higher education?

Calling out to the community/network for input. …

Here’s the top five articles, books, websites, etc., that we’ve been reading or thinking about the past week. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them.  In addition, if you have items you’d like us to consider for the top five, add them in the comments or send them to Tom or Mike.

1.  Have you experienced, participated in, or witnessed

Tweckle (twek’ul) vt. to abuse a speaker only to Twitter followers in the audience while he/she is speaking”?

Any thoughts on how Tweckle (or the possibility of it) affect conference (and classroom) dynamics?  Any practices which you’ve found (or  think could address) to decrease its influence?  — Conference Humiliation: They’re Tweeting Behind Your Back (Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 17, 2009).  Note:  on the other side, I’ve seen plenty of positive commenting on conferencing/events.

2.  A number of Chronicle of Higher Education articles on news/journalism including:

• Academe and the Decline of News Media (Forum, November 15, 2009)
• I’ve Read the News Today, Oh Boy (Ben Yagoda, November 15, 2009)
• Journalism Schools Can Push Coverage Beyond Breaking News (Nicholas Lemann, November 15, 2009)
• University-Based Reporting Could Keep Journalism Alive (Michael Schudson and Leonard Downie Jr., November 15, 2009)
• We Need ‘Philosophy of Journalism’ (Carlin Romano, November 15, 2009).

3. Belle de Jour reveals herself…as a research scientist.  The anonymous blog and television show Secret Diary of a Call Girl – written from the perspective of a high-end prostitute – were much bigger in the UK than on this side of the pond. The mystery of “who is Belle de Jour?” ended this week, when Dr. Brooke Magnanti confessed that she had turned to prostitution as a way to pay for her PhD. Magnanti now works for The Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health. Magnanti says it was good work:

Dr Magnanti told the Sunday Times she worked as a prostitute from 2003 to late 2004, and found it “so much more enjoyable” than her shifts in another job as a computer programmer.

How ironic that Magnanti studies child health. Tanya Gold of the Guardian says don’t be misled: most prostitutes in the UK live pretty awful lives.

The report found that 70%–95% of the interviewees were physically assaulted while working as prostitutes. 60%–75% were raped while working as prostitutes; of these, more than half were repeatedly raped. 65%–95% meanwhile were sexually abused as children; the line of continuity between being used as a child and being used as an adult is clear.

Around the world, prostitution is often a form of slavery, as CNN reported this week. Urbana’s Advocacy and Poverty track is going to focus on the issue of modern day slavery and sex trafficking, and the work of Christian organizations against this evil.

4. Big Man on Campus – Time profiled Gordon Gee, president of The Ohio State University, anointing him as the best college president in the nation. (Here is the rest of their top 10 list.) Earlier this year, Gee told universities they face “reinvention or extinction” at the American Council on Education’s annual meeting.

To avoid “slouching into irrelevance,” he said, universities must structure themselves horizontally, rather than vertically, change the way they reward faculty and staff members, and learn to better collaborate with each other. While partnerships with business, elementary and secondary schools, and governments are crucial, he said, perhaps the most important links are between universities.

You can download Gee’s full lecture at the ACE website.

Books

Introverts in the Church cover

5. Tom’s been recommending  Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture (Adam McHugh, InterVarsity Press, November 2009) to a number of people, including members of the academic community.  Below’s a quote from Chapter 1, available on-line through InterVarsity Press.  An excellent author interview can be found at Adam McHugh on ‘Introverts in the Church’.

The pragmatism that we have inherited fosters an action oriented culture. Evangelicalism values the doer over the thinker.  The evangelical God has a big agenda. It’s as if the moment we surrender our lives to Christ we are issued a flashing neon sign that says “GO!” There is a restless energy to evangelicalism that leads to a full schedule and a fast pace. Some have said that, in Christian culture, busyness is next to godliness. We are always in motion, constantly growing, ever expanding. …“American religion is conspicuous for its messianically pretentious energy, its embarrassingly banal prose, and its impatiently hustling ambition.” [Eugene Peterson]

Some of the Sesame Street cast members

In How We Got to Sesame Street; Art on Screen (The Chronicle of Higher Education. January 16, 2009), Evan R. Goldstein treats us to some of the history of Sesame Street, which celebrated 40 years on November 10.

In 1966 a group of friends gathered for a dinner party in Manhattan. As the evening was winding down, one of the guests, Lloyd N. Morrisett, a vice president at the Carnegie Corporation, turned to his host, a television executive named Joan Ganz Cooney, and asked a seemingly innocuous question: Can television educate young children? …

Almost four years after the Cooney dinner party, on November 10, 1969, Sesame Street showed up on public television across the country. The series was greeted with a torrent of gushing reviews. “The show moves, seduces, diverts, dazzles, amuses, and infects,” raved a writer at Variety. “Learning seems almost a byproduct of fun,” noted another critic. Children’s television would never be the same.”

It’s hard not to concede that education begins in the context of where one grows up and TV viewing is almost universal among the kids in our culture.  As such, would you credit Sesame Street or similar TV shows for your early childhood education (or at least some of it)?  Does Sesame Street Turns 40, But It Doesn’t Look a Day Over 25 resonate with you?

In the last 40 years, Sesame Street taught us to celebrate our differences, to bask in our own individuality and has continuously redefined “normal” to fit us all. Sesame Street taught us to read, to write, and yes, to count. It opened our eyes to cultures beyond our cul-de-sac and taught us global thinking. Sesame Street made us believe that we could be anything and that anything was possible. Sesame Street taught us to love music and laughter and learning.

A couple more questions to ponder/discuss:

Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street

1. How much emphasis should parents or the educational system as a whole place on educational TV for kids, youth, young adults, adults?
2. What has the educational experiment shown us about what kids can/do learn from TV?  Do they learn/absorb more than the basics, e.g., values, perspective on the real world?
3. Would you agree with the Robert Smith’s 40 Years Of Lessons On ‘Sesame Street’, which ran on NPR yesterday (11/10/2009)?  E.g., Children Are Adaptable. Keep It Simple.  The Children are always right (Note: Bonus on audio).
4. As one involved in higher education, do you have any recommendations for the next decade of Sesame Street as it seeks to educate kids across the spectrum or for parents as they seek to evaluate it’s role in the overall educational toolkit?  Note:  Sesame Street provides a peek of it’s future direction at It’s all new and better than ever as Sesame Street turns 40!

P.S.  Street Gang:  The Complete History of Sesame Street (Michael Davis. Viking. 2008) looks like a good read.  I found an excerpt posted here.

Here’s the top five articles, books, websites, etc., that we’ve been reading or thinking about the past week. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them.  In addition, if you have items you’d like us to consider for the top five, add them in the comments or send them to Tom or Mike.

Claude Levi-Strauss

1.  The Big Questions: Have our colleges and universities lost sight of their purpose? (Jerry Pattengale, Books & Culture, November/December 2009) critiques Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (Anthony Kronman, Yale University Press, 2008) and recommends The American University in a Postsecular Age (Co-edited by Douglas & Rhonda Jacobsen, Oxford University Press, 2008).

2. Can a biologist trust an evangelical Christian? – InterVarsity Graduate & Faculty Ministry at Indiana University will be hosting this event next Thursday, Nov. 12.

This panel discussion features three evangelical scholars on the topic of Christianity, science and evolution. Our primary audience for this event will be scholars who are skeptical or even hostile about the idea of integrating religion and science. We have chosen the topic as part of the Indiana University “themester” on “Evolution, Diversity, and Change.” Our goals, at this point, are to provide a model of what it might look like to integrate belief in God with scientific inquiry; to put names and faces behind what can often be the demonized other (evangelical Christians); to foster a discussion about the integration of religion and science; to work at eroding the destructive binary that is assumed to exist between science and religion; and to work at building trust between the scientific community and evangelical Christianity.

For more information, check out their website, www.iugfm.blogspot.com.

3. Claude Lévi-Strauss Dies at 100 – One of the most important intellectual figures of the 20th Century died last Friday. From the NY Times’ obituary:

A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of “structuralism,” a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations. His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France. And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come before in anthropology.

Other reflections on his life and work: WSJ’s obituary and an elegy, NPR’s story about his 100th birthday, Eric Banks’ post at the Chronicle of Higher Ed about Lévi-Strauss’ importance.

Photo: Claude Levi-Strauss in 1992, from sagabardon via Flickr

4.  In a NY Times Op-Ed entitled Teach Your Teachers Well, Susan Engel (a senior lecturer in psychology and the director of the teaching program at Williams College) builds upon Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s Urging for ‘Revolutionary Change’ in Nation’s Teacher-Training Programs.  How about this angle on the problem?

Our best universities have, paradoxically, typically looked down their noses at education, as if it were intellectually inferior. The result is that the strongest students are often in colleges that have no interest in education, while the most inspiring professors aren’t working with students who want to teach. This means that comparatively weaker students in less intellectually rigorous programs are the ones preparing to become teachers.

So the first step is to get the best colleges to throw themselves into the fray. If education was a good enough topic for Plato, John Dewey and William James, it should be good enough for 21st-century college professors. — Susan Engel, Teach Your Teachers Well, NY Times, 11/02/2009

5. Online Education, Growing Fast, Eyes the Truly ‘Big Time’ (Marc Perry, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 30, 2009) as The $50K Club: 58 Private Colleges Pass a Pricing Milestone (Reported by Scott Carlson, Kathryn Masterson, and Jeffrey Brainard, and written by Mr. Carlson. Chronicle of Higher Education. November 1, 2009).  Looking for some thoughts on how liberal arts colleges and their ideals will survive the current economic crisis?

Traditional reasoning about the enrichment of the “student as future citizen” can only go so far when parents who pay the tuition or students taking the courses can’t see a bottom line in the form of a lucrative job after graduation. — Katharine S. Brooks, Close the Gap Between the Liberal Arts and Career Services, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 1, 2009

In Close the Gap Between the Liberal Arts and Career Services, Katharine S. Brooks, director of liberal-arts career services, University of Texas at Austin, offers some good ideas regarding career services.  For parents, students, and educators she has a new book,  You Majored in What? Mapping Your Path From Chaos to Career (Viking, 2009), which might be worth exploring.  If you’ve read it, let us know what you think.

Here’s the top five articles, books, websites, etc., that we’ve been reading or thinking about the past week. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them.  In addition, if you have items you’d like us to consider for the top five, add them in the comments or send them to Tom or Mike.

1.  Duncan Urges ‘Revolutionary Change’ in Nation’s Teacher-Training Programs (Kelly Field, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 21, 2009):  Do you agree with the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who recently called attention to the nation’s colleges of education for

doing a “mediocre job” of preparing teachers for “the realities of the 21st-century classroom” and need “revolutionary change—not evolutionary tinkering” … [and being]  the “neglected stepchild” of higher education.

2. Beam Me to the Faculty Senate:  Videoconferencing proves useful on campuses (Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 18, 2009).  So we’re moving in the direction of less and less real presence, not just in the classroom (where increasing numbers of large lectures can be downloaded at some non-virtual campuses) but also among those who lead educational institutions.  Tom has observed a lot of road time from  campuses in the Penn State University educational system to State College.  Yes, he’s wondered about the necessities of these trips.  But what happens when people only get to know one-another or receive training/supervision through videoconferencing, even if it is virtual face-to-face?  Of course, it’s better than no communication or only older forms of communication such as written or teleconferencing, isn’t it?

3.  For Decades, Puzzling People With Mathematics (John Tierney, NY Times, October 19, 2009): How many of you have enjoyed the recreational mathematics of Martin Gardner, who turned 95 on October 21?  Did you know that in 1956, when Gardner at the age of 42 started a monthly column on recreational mathematics for Scientific American, he had never taken a math course beyond high school and that he’s made his trade by researching/re-publishing puzzles developed by others?

According to Ronald Graham, a mathematician at the University of California, San Diego,“Many have tried to emulate him; no one has succeeded. … Martin has turned thousands of children into mathematicians, and thousands of mathematicians into children.”

Where does Gardner believe the pleasure of recreational mathematics come from?  “Evolution has developed the brain’s ability to solve puzzles, and at the same time has produced in our brain a pleasure of solving problems.”

4.  Remember the tossing around of mild dementia in relationship to Francis Collins? For those interested in learning more about dementia, take some to read/consider Treating Dementia, but Overlooking Its Physical Toll (Tara Parker-Pope, NY Times, October 20, 2009). The article begins:

Dementia is often viewed as a disease of the mind, an illness that erases treasured memories but leaves the body intact.

But dementia is a physical illness, too — a progressive, terminal disease that shuts down the body as it attacks the brain. Although the early stages can last for years, the life expectancy of a patient with advanced dementia is similar to that of a patient with advanced cancer. …

5.  On Wednesday night, I [Tom] started reading Anne Rice’s Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).  I have desired to learn about Rice’s spiritual journal, so the numerous comments regarding education come as an unexpected bonus feature.  Below’s an excerpt of Rice’s reflections on elementary education and learning how to read.  More of her comments on education in another post.  Anyone have a similar experience or fear of education?

"Called Out of Darkness" Cover

When I went to school and began to read, I lost an immense world of image, color, and intricate connections, but undoubtedly I retained more than I lost.I gained in school a poor understanding of things through written text.  School was when excruciating boredom and anger and frustration really began for me.  The mystery and calm of the early years were destroyed by school.  School was torture.  School was like being in jail.  It was captivity and torment and failure.

But what remained forever, what continued, was the sense of God and His Presence, of His embracing awareness of all we said and did and wanted and failed to do, and of His love.  School couldn’t destroy that faith.  And alongside it, I retained the sense that the world was an interesting creative place, especially if one could get out of school (p.30).

Welcome to this week’s Week in Review! If you have your own link or suggestion, please add it to the comments, or email it to Tom or Mike.

From Tom

1.  Another piece to throw into our technology conversation:  How about teaching naked, i.e., sans machines?  Do you agree with José A. Bowen, dean of Southern Methodist University’s Meadows School of the Arts, in his comments regarding the quality of classroom powerpoint instruction and the rise of on-line classes to replace such offerings?  Note:  The video complents Jeffrey Young’s Chronicle of Higher Education article When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom (July 20, 2009).

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to this week’s Week in Review! If you have your own link or suggestion, please add it to the comments, or email it to Tom or Mike.

From Tom

Change or Die: Scholarly E-Mail Lists, Once Vibrant, Fight for Relevance (Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, 6/29/2009).  Do you agree with T. Mills Kelly, an associate professor of history and associate director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, who argues professors are shifting their on-line communication from e-mail lists to blogs, wikis, Twitter, and social networks like Facebook?

No Smiting (Paul Bloom, NY Times, 6/24/2009). Has anyone read The Evolution of God by Robert Wright?  The NY Times has taken interest in it with interviews (Questions for Robert Wright: Evolutionary Theology and Book Review) and a NY Times Sunday Review cover article by Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale. Below’s a section I find of particular interest.  How do you respond to the assertion of an evolving God who may in a some vague way exist beyond us, but in the practical realm is shaped by the experience and the marketing of dedicated practitioners?

For Wright, the next evolutionary step is for practitioners of Abrahamic faiths to give up their claim to distinctiveness, and then renounce the specialness of monotheism altogether. In fact, when it comes to expanding the circle of moral consideration, he argues, religions like Buddhism have sometimes “outperformed the Abrahamics.” But this sounds like the death of God, not his evolution. And it clashes with Wright’s own proposal, drawn from work in evolutionary psychology, that we invented religion to satisfy certain intellectual and emotional needs, like the tendency to search for moral causes of natural events and the desire to conform with the people who surround us. These needs haven’t gone away, and the sort of depersonalized and disinterested God that Wright anticipates would satisfy none of them. He is betting that historical forces will trump our basic psychological makeup. I’m not so sure.

Under age binge drinking on campus:  You may remember last year’s Rethink the Drinking Age Campaign Taking on 21 and College Presidents Take On 21), in which more than 100 college presidents and chancellors called for reconsidering the legal drinking age, which since the 1980s has been set at 21 (by each and every state).  Why?  Is it a desire to move beyond in loco parentis entirely?  What will be their response to the new research and conversation regarding colleges being the only environment in which binge drinking has increased over the past several decades?  What is the situation on your campus?  Is it more prevalent among men?  Note:  A few articles on this topic include: Inside Higher Ed’s Failing Grade on Alcohol, NY Times Op-Ed Binge Drinking on Campus, and Science Daily’s Higher Drinking Age Linked To Less Binge Drinking — Except In College Students.

From Mike

An Academic in Afghanistan (Chronicle, $) – William Corley, who has been involved with ESN from the beginning and usually serves his country as an English professor at Cal Poly Pomona, has spent the past year stationed in Afghanistan as a military analyst.  His recent essay in the Chronicle starts memorably:

First light on Memorial Day, 2009. I’m awake without an alarm at 4:53 a.m. After a quick visit to the gym and a short run, I put on my uniform and go to work. Day 208 in Afghanistan begins.

It’s a great perspective on both the military and academia, and I hope that you have access to the Chronicle so that you can read the whole thing.  Here’s a paragraph I especially enjoyed, comparing his military writing to that of his “real” job:

If I wrote as much in the States as I do here, I would probably be tenured already. Scratch that — I’d be an academic superstar. Even more ironic for a professional writer, the papers I produce here, despite the inevitable sequestration due to classification levels, circulate more broadly and are read more closely than anything I’ve ever published as an academic, notwithstanding the aforementioned Cassandra caveat. Would I produce more popular work if I limited myself to two pages when writing on an academic topic? Perhaps the MLA should look into this.

More on justification – As if N.T. Wright and John Piper weren’t big enough guns to weigh in on the doctrine of justification, now the Pope is offering his (new? old?) perspective, too. Scot McKnight helpfully summarizes Pope Benedict XVI’s view of justification, from the Pope’s new book, Saint Paul. (BTW, in case you don’t already know, before becoming Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had long been an important theologian and scholar – check out both the number and variety of his writings and be suitable humbled.)

Academic Bait-and-Switch – I enjoyed and was challenged by this pseudonymous essay in the Chronicle by “Henry Adams” (as in, “The Education of…” I assume), which describes the author’s rude introduction to the graduate school TA system by teaching freshman comp at “Elite National University.” He describes the system as “bait and switch” because the “Elite” students came to campus expecting to be educated by the top scholars in the country, and instead find themselves taught by greenhorn TAs just a few years older than themselves.

From the Community

In response to last week’s week-in-review about Galileo, Hannah referred us to Peter Harrison’s The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, which Ted Davis also recommended (though be sure to read Ted’s comments about the book).

In response to Tom’s April post about End the University as We Know It, reader Clint shared a link to his own blog post about the topic, “Restructuring the Humanities.”

Books

This is Mike here.  I spent last week at the 2009 Midwest Faculty Conference with John Sommerville, and I’ll write more about that experience next week.  In the mean time, I’ll mention two books that came very highly recommended at the conference, both of which weigh in at under 200 pages, which relate to topics we’ve discussed here online.

At the conference, Sommerville led a seminar discussing Culture Matters by T.M Moore. I bought a copy but have not yet read it. Subtitled “A Call for Consensus on Christian Cultural Engagement,” Moore

sketches the ways in which Christians engage, resist, escape from and try to change the culture in which they live (Richard John Neuhaus, from the Foreword).

Moore examines these ways through the cultural activities of specific Christians, comparing both classic and contemporary exemplars: Augustine, Celtic Christians, John Calvin, Abraham Kuyper, Charles Colson, Phil Keaggy, and Czeslaw Milosz. I’m looking forward to Moore’s chapter on Milosz, the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, whom I had the fortune to hear read a few years before his death.

The second book, which was highly recommend by InterVarsity’s own Tom Trevethan, was Naturalism by Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro. The book quickly sold out at the conference (OK – there was only one copy for sale), but here’s what John Milbank thinks of this book:

“Demonstrates with succinctness, brilliance, and precision that modern Anglo-Saxon naturalists are not rationalists but . . . are, in fact, the enemies of reason, which can only have any reality if the physical world has a spiritual, rational source.”

From Tom

Adam Smith: What’s Next for Google Book Search? (Chronicle of Higher Education, 06/12/09):  Do you use Google Books to take a preview and/or search materials?  Is your institution partnering with Google Book Search?  Does Smith address your concerns regarding access, fair use, and privacy?  What are your thoughts on orphan works?  How do you define orphan works?

Google has scanned millions of books and made snippets available online through its ambitious Book Search program. The project has taken heat from authors and publishers, but Adam Smith, Google’s director of product management, says it’s a good thing for academe. (Audio interview, 9:36)

[Mike notes: there are at least two groups not happy with Google's digital books program: the Department of Justice and Amazon.com.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out.]

China’s College Entry Test Is an Obsession (NY Times, 06/13/09):  Who is familiar with China’s gao kao, i.e., high test?  Would a boost of similar seriousness about education be helpful in the United States or would it increase competitive commercialization of higher education?  How does one encourage the pursuit and wise application of knowledge through vocation in the wider society?

The Chinese test is in some ways like the American SAT, except that it lasts more than twice as long. The nine-hour test is offered just once a year and is the sole determinant for admission to virtually all Chinese colleges and universities. About three in five students make the cut.

Families pull out all the stops to optimize their children’s scores.

From Mike

Mentoring: Call for Papers – The University of New Mexico Mentoring Institute is seeking proposals about effective mentoring for their Second Mentoring Conference. I went last year and was favorably impressed. While the institute and conference are hosted by a public university, there were a number of Christian academics involved last year (from both secular and Christian universities), and issues related to religious faith were openly discussed. For example, several of the mentoring presentations addressed spiritual components of mentoring, two of the plenary speakers (Brad Johnson and Lewis Schlosser) spoke briefly about their different religious views in the context of their mentor-mentee and collegial relationship, and several speakers spoke to questions about how to relate to a mentor or protege with very different religious, political, or personal beliefs from your own. Deadline for submissions is July 31.

Languages on Life Support – From the Chronicle, a survey of the state of dying languages in the world today, and the efforts (or lack thereof) of academic linguists to preserve them.

Of the estimated 6,000 to 7,000 languages in the world — about one-half of the number used 10,000 years ago — at least one-half will almost certainly be dead by midcentury, while another 40 percent will most likely become too diminished to survive much beyond 2100. The causes are largely agreed upon: colonization and other demographic shifts, government neglect or outright suppression of regional and indigenous languages, the influence of mass media.

The article explores the question of whether Noam Chomsky’s theory of a “universal grammar” eliminates the urgency to record details of specific languages.  Chomsky himself says no, but others aren’t so sure.  Personally, I was struck by the complete absence of any mention whatsoever of groups like Wycliffe Bible Translators or SIL, which are doing serious work around the world preserving languages.   (For more on linguistics, see my previous post about Dan Everett.)

From Tom

Five Ways to Fix America’s Schools (Harold O. Levy, NY Times Op-Ed, 06/08/2009):  Any comments and/or recommendations?

The biggest improvement we can make in higher education is to produce more qualified applicants. Half of the freshmen at community colleges and a third of freshmen at four-year colleges matriculate with academic skills in at least one subject too weak to allow them to do college work. Unsurprisingly, the average college graduation rates even at four-year institutions are less than 60 percent. Read the rest of this entry »

Would you agree with my idealistic enthusiasm for My Freshman Year:  What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student, the story of a professor of anthropology at a large state university who realized that she no longer understood the behavior and attitudes of her students and returned to the classroom?  And my uneasiness when reading that some Online Professors Pose as Students to Encourage Real Learning (Chronicle of Higher Education, 5/29/09), in the class which they’re teaching?  Can you offer testimonies, tips, or sources regarding what it takes to stimulate an on-line learning community?  We would love to have specific suggestions regarding how to direct the conversation of the ESN Book Club: Your Mind Matters.

Note:  If you don’t have a copy of John Stott’s Your Mind Matters, I’d encourage you to borrow/purchase so you’re ready to go on Tuesday.  If you’d like a head start on reading but don’t have a copy of the book, visit InterVarsity Press’ website for PDFs of the Foreward and Chapter 1.