So in a completely uncharacteristic move, I'm going to Switzerland in March for no good reason other than to, well, go to Switzerland and visit a friend. It's a ridiculous extravagance (though I'll be on my friend's futon, and found a really decent plane ticket) - there's not even a conference going on or work to be done! I think it's called a vacation, though I'm not entirely familiar with the term. ;) I haven't been to Europe since a trip to England for a conference in summer 2002, so I'm pretty psyched. I'll be staying in Basel, and plan to take a trip to Strasbourg (have to do something practical with that undergrad French major) and to spend a day or two in the Alps. Yay!
January 2007 Archives
Chuck's weekend had begun. (via the NY Times)
This quote from an article in the recent Educational Researcher resonated with me, and is lovely and elegant besides:
"One of the risks of 'wide-awakeness' is that the sights and sounds of a culture in crisis may overwhelm. At one extreme, they may thrust the teacher back into reliance on precedent...At the other extreme, they may cause him deep disquietude. He may realize, as never before, that he is responsible for his moral choices, that - with dissonance afflicting him and no one to run to for a resolution - he is dreadfully free..." (Maxine Green, 1973)
This also describes my experience coming to "wide-awakeness" as a graduate student, a process both wonderful and "dreadful" at the same time, as the quote suggests.
(As an aside, I have no idea how long this frequent blogging will continue once my boss gets back from break, and I start collecting data for my dissertation. In the meantime though, it's nice to be catching up on some reading, and some blogging...)
So I'm reading an article in the Times about high school students who take on a full load of challenging courses in high school and, as a result, find their first year of college rather less than challenging. (The article does point out that most of these students are enrolled at expensive prep schools or excellent public magnet schools, where such classes may be found.) Apparently these students have a buzz word of their own - zoomers: "bookish versions of athletically driven children who train seriously for a sport from an early age," complete with bookish versions of sports moms and dads. Anyway, the article is an interesting overview of the current discourses around achievement in high school (one of my New Year's resolutions is to do more reading about high school students, given that they in time become the students that I study).
Via today's Wired Campus Blog, two recent studies of social network sites. The Pew Internet's study focuses on teens and privacy; Prof. Sameer Hinduja's focuses on college students and debunks some common assumptions about the salacious nature of MySpace use. I haven't been able to find a downloadable article for the second one, but some Googling leads me to believe that the findings will be presented in March at the annual conference of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.
(I find it funny, btw, that the austere New York Times found this newsworthy enough to post on their homepage.)
Well, new year + spare time on my hands = blog redesign. I decided to retire the black ribbon (which I added to the blog when Bush was kind-of sort-of elected for the second time) and go with a more soothing image that I took a few summers ago in a field in my favorite state, Vermont. I may add a flickr feed on the left, now that I'm taking pictures with my new camera and have resurrected my flickr page. You'll also notice the gimmicky-cool web page preview by Snap: if you mouse over a link, you'll get a thumbnail image of the website that the link goes to. Fun, in a geeky kinda way!
Happy New Year!
