Feb 1, 2021

Seven strategies of successful online teaching

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Build relations intentionally. Intuitive ways of relationship-building do not work online, therefore you need to apply specific effort. Educ...
Jan 19, 2021

Hybrid as default: Imagining a post-COVID university

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The year of forced distant learning is revealing two contradictory ideas: One is that meaningful instruction in the online environment is po...
Jan 9, 2021

Trump syndrome or the assimilation bias

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One may not think much of Donald Trump, but he seems to be sincere. Sincerity even that of an error is a major part of his appeal. His case ...
Jan 4, 2021

The Deep State does exist, and we are better off for it

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It is not what Trump thinks, not a conspiracy of bureaucrats against him. This country has a cadre of civil servants for whom maintaining th...
Dec 21, 2020

Martial law, official poisoners, and hope

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Can’t think of anything other than the crazy, evil things in the news. Trump has been discussing martial law on Friday, willing to throw awa...
Dec 14, 2020

What does my signature mean? Or Why are universities so clunky?

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We have moved away from paper, thanks to COVID. However, just like before, I often wonder, what does my signature mean on this and that pape...
Dec 5, 2020

December in the Central Valley

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This land makes you wait for it: December, fall, my favorite season. Stand under a big ginkgo tree, squinting at the autumnal yellow sun; le...
Nov 23, 2020

It is time to shrink

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In a conversation with one of my chairs, I suddenly realized that the best thing I can do for her right now would be to take less of her tim...
Nov 9, 2020

American Education: The party of choice and the party of resources

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Betsy DeVos has been a staunch advocate of the “party of choice” in American education. It believes that giving parents choice will lead to ...
Nov 2, 2020

Depolarization of America

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Tomorrow night, or a few days later, half of this country will be celebrating, while the other half will be fuming. In close elections, turn...
Oct 26, 2020

Teaching is not political activism

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The Antiracist movement captured the academia, provided urgency, energy and a new focus to our work for justice. Many of our previous effort...
Oct 19, 2020

The harsh professor syndrome

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It happens to those professors who do not learn how to teach and relate to students reasonably well within the first 3 years or so of their ...
Oct 12, 2020

Churches, unmasked

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Some 19 per cent of Americans do not believe masks are effective in preventing the spread of COVID-19 . Many of those are Christian, and chu...
Oct 4, 2020

Black Lives Matter: (Only) or (Too)?

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In conversations with my Russian friends, I suddenly realized that some of them completely misunderstand what “Black Lives Matter” means. Th...
Sep 27, 2020

We are the tools that need care

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Let’s not pretend this is normal, because it is not. The entire year online feels like a sentence to an exile. The conditions are reasonable...
Sep 21, 2020

Past mistakes do not set precedents

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Precedents are important in law and in all policy applications. Considering a precedent helps to ensure consistent and therefore fair applic...
Sep 14, 2020

Don’t replicate, recreate: Observational learning in an online course

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In his effort to overcome the limitations of behaviorism, Albert Bandura demonstrated the existence of observational learning, a subspecies ...
Sep 7, 2020

Why can’t universities become tech companies? An investment opportunity

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 If you follow business headlines, you probably heard that Walmart has turned into a tech company, and Tesla is not a car manufacturing firm...
Aug 31, 2020

The parallel universe does exist: Education after the pandemic

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The current pandemic is not that interesting on its own; history knows a plenty of similar tragedies. What is interesting is that for the fi...
Aug 6, 2020

Tool fetishism in online teaching

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Anxiety about online teaching skills often manifests in an interesting way: instructors are drawn to the vast array of digital tools, platfo...
Jul 27, 2020

Wait and see

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Imagination is normally an administrator’s friend. What we do is anticipate problems, plan, and prepare; all of these rely on the ability to...
Jul 11, 2020

All public sculptures should go

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I never understood public sculpture of leaders, never liked them. In any city I visited, they are an eye sore: all these marshals, generals,...
Jul 5, 2020

Is teacher preparation in California racist?

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OK, let’s get serious, even if we have to get a little controversial. We know that any artificial barrier will disproportionately affect peo...
Jun 28, 2020

The quarantine and the relational self

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Today I stumbled across a fascinating 2002 paper, The Relational Self: An Interpersonal Social–Cognitive Theory , by Andersen and Chen. The...
Jun 22, 2020

Regulatory Paroxysms or How to Control the Uncontrollable

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Universities have largely been successful in transitioning to the online environment, much more than almost any other industry. Victims of t...
Jun 15, 2020

Racism, the Old Deluder

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One can slice racism in several ways, but at a minimum, it has the overt and the covert parts. The former includes explicitly racist polici...