Meanwhile, elsewhere on Sterneworks. . . .

I haven’t been blogging much the past couple days as I’ve been using my blog time to update other parts of the site. As job season will soon be beginning, I thought it was time for my annual update of the “Professionalization” section of my website. There’s a bunch of new stuff up there — …

More on Academic Blogging

The Barnacle of Higher Ed has been covering the controversy over academic blogging (or doing their best to manufacture one) for over a year now. The latest is a symposium on whether blogging “damaged” Juan Cole’s career. Cole is a middle east expert and a full professor at the University of Michigan. The “damage”? Apparently …

Disembodied Fish

Stanley Fish’s op-ed in today’s New York Times(1) argues that professors must separate themselves from their subject matter in the classroom. I believe we have some professional duties which require us to put our “selves” aside (for instance, not grading down students for disagreeing with us) but I also think that there are times when …

Google Book Search

So today was my first serious encounter with google book search. I hadn’t played around with it much, but came across an unattributed phrase in a so-so book on animal rights called An Unnatural Order. The book argues that the domination of nature through agriculture, men’s domination of women, people’s domination of animals and colonial …

A New Series: On Books, “The Book,” Writing, Etc.

So I’ve decided to start using my “category” function and start doing “series” on various things. The topic that’s been on my mind a lot lately is publishing — the state of the book, the way publishing works, debates about open access and the public status of scholarship, etc. I’ve also been collecting some odds …

A Little Academic History

So I was over at the website for the Society for the Social Study of Science to see if this year’s program had been posted yet (travel arrangements, you know — Westjet has some direct flights to Vancouver) and stumbled across their historical programs, which includes the program from the first meeting at Cornell University. …