This land acknowledgement is your land acknowledgement

For the past few years I've seen an increase in land acknowledgements at the start of conference and workshop sessions. You know what I mean: This [building, event] is on the unceded and ancestral land of the [native tribe name] and ongoing members; the work of this presentation was doing on unceded and ancestral land…

Am I the last to know?

Luckily for me, last week I was working on campus and so missed much of the Amy Coney Barrett hearings commentary. One thing, however, did cross my radar and got me thinking. It was this exchange with Sen. Hirono: “I have no agenda,” Barrett replied. “I do want to be clear that I have never…

Making a sub-Prime list

People who know me know I'm anti-Amazon. There are so many reasons, from the way they treat warehouse workers and drivers to killing off mom&pop and Main Street businesses to not paying local taxes. I understand the people who say "but the discount" -- to which I say, "but your town and local employment!" Anyway,…

I’ve been thinking a lot about this

The other day, I saw this tweet: https://twitter.com/rskudesia/status/1255907542380748801 Milton has a strong academic integrity policy, so clearly any students that got caught with this would face consequences.  Hamilton College (where I was a student) also had one so strong it led to the resignation of a President. There's a response to the tweet, that contrasts…

Not a fan

There are words that we, in polite society, don't say.  Some of those words have been claimed, or reclaimed, by the group intended to be insulted by that word (eg, queer).  And some are supposed to be used only "in group". I raise this because one of our popular databases here is the online OED. …

No time

One of the blogs I follow, Being More with Less, had a post recently called 9 Things I Refuse to Make Time For Anymore. Now, most of these are self-care things, like not rewriting the past or guilt and resentment.  I wholeheartedly endorse those, but that's not what I want to talk about just now. …

Minor Musings

Doug has a wonderful post entitled Just another shill for educational companies? that I encourage everyone to read. Here's my policy: all ideas in any of my posts, from these Minor Musings to other, more detailed commentary, are mine - possibly inspired by others but not paid for or encouraged by a company.  One of…

Thinking About Plagiarism at #ALAAC17

Just before creating this blog post, I read A Guide for Resisting Edtech: the Case against Turnitin which poses some interesting moral and ethical questions for us to ponder. Courtney Lewis presented at ALA's Annual Conference on international students and plagiarism. It's something that I've been thinking about for a few years, because how we…

Some random thoughts on books and reading

For a variety of reasons, I've been home alone this past week and have had far too much energy for my own good. Which, of course, means that Things Are Getting Done: organizing, mostly, but reading and writing letters and blog posts (lucky readers!) and cleaning. Don't judge, but when I moved my books from…

Ego, checked

31 years ago, We Are the World was released as a response to both Band-Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas and the Ethiopian famine.  One of the stories about that recording session was that artists were told to "check their egos at the door" (to ensure that, the solos were recorded after the chorus). Ten…