Archive for February, 2008
Academic Advising
My brain feels like the egg in that frying pan…it’s a bit cooked. I will have had over 60 appointments this week. Faces and names have blurred together into something that looks like a Jackson Pollock painting.
Frequent topics of discussion this week include: “fun” classes, study abroad, dual-enrollment, graduation, financial aid, class standing, course overrides, changing majors, the location of the Registrar’s Office, Spring term classes, bacc core, studying, transfer credit articulation, closed classes, waitlisting, Phase 1 and Phase 2 registration, the sauna-like temperature of my office, recitations, the OSU Luau, caffeinated beverages, social justice, the benefits of being a Mac user, the aesthetic limits of Poling Hall, course petitions, long term planning, transcripts, practicum/internship applications, and the height differential of my chair versus my guest chair.
Suzanne Pharr
I was introduced to Suzanne Pharr via a reading assignment while in the class, Ethics of Diversity at Oregon State University in 2006. We were assigned to read “The Common Elements of Oppressions” — a chapter in Pharr’s book, Hetersexism: A weapon of homophobia. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the chapter and hoped to put it on my blog. I did quite a few Google searches and could not find an electronic copy of the chapter. I had found Suzanne’s website and decided to send her an email to see if she had an electronic copy.
Technology and Student Affairs
iStudentAffairs.com: A social networking site for Student Affairs administrators. 661 people have already signed up. The site runs off of Ning. I’m not sure if I have the life space for another website, but the discussions on iStudentAffairs.com have been interesting.
Technology panel: I’ll be on a panel for Academic Advising + Web 2.0 at the regional NACADA conference in Vancouver in March. I guess I’ll be chiming in on anything to do with accessibility, blogging, wikis, web statistics, podcasting, rss, etc. I’m walking out if someone calls Facebook an “emerging technology.”
Academic Advising Wiki: I have convinced my colleagues that an internal knowledge base a.k.a. a wiki, would be highly beneficial for our office. I demoed an installation of MediaWiki (similar to the Oregon State University wiki) and hope to get it up and running next month. For more information on higher education and wikis, check out these videos on “21 days of Wiki Adoption“:
Stuff White People Like
A letter to Ikea
Dear Ikea,
Many years ago, in 2001, I purchased two beech-colored items of furniture. The items, a bookcase and a CD tower, were bathed in a lovely golden brown veneer. Recently, Wendy and I decided to embark on a trip to the new Ikea in Portland, Oregon. We decided that we would like to procure another beech CD tower. Upon our arrival at the Portland store, we grabbed a golf pencil and used a gps to locate the CD tower on the demo floor. I was gleeful when I discovered a fleet of benno CD towers in all sorts of different colors. I wrote down the stock number and we proceeded downstairs to the loading area. The box containing a beech benno was loaded onto the neatest handtruck ever and we rolled to the checkout counter.
Three days passed before I decided to build the benno. I opened the packaging and that’s when I realized that something was wrong. The beech on the new benno was much lighter than my seven year old beech colored furniture! Gasp! I showed Wendy the color disparity and we knew that we did not have a match.
Northern Illinois University
There has been a campus shooting at Northern Illinois University (NIU).
NIU can confirm six fatalities, including the gunman. Four of the dead were female and two, including the gunman, were male. In total, there were 22 injured or killed.
NIU can confirm that the shooter was an NIU graduate student in sociology in the Spring of 2007 but was not currently enrolled.
University of Kentucky
The University of Kentucky has hired its first diversity officer!
Dr. Judy ‘J.J.’ Jackson, set to become the University of Kentucky’s first vice president for institutional diversity, has big plans for developing and implementing a diversity agenda that she says is essential for learning.
Jackson, who starts this summer, will work strategically to craft UK’s diversity agenda, which she says is essential to establishing a strong foundation for learning. She notes that one of the most important goals during her first year at UK will be to conduct a university-wide “gap analysis” to devise various strategies on recruiting a diverse group of students and faculty.
“Often times, people don’t think of diversity and excellence as the same concept … the goal and the mission that the University of Kentucky has embarked upon demands that people think of diversity and excellence as conceptual cohabitants,” says Jackson, whose responsibilities will include advising the university’s president and provost on matters relating to academic, fiscal and administrative policy.
Recipe – Polenta chili
Polenta Chili:
makes 4 servings
Polenta Chili Ingredients:
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 medium green bell pepper, chopped
1 shallot, chopped
2 to 4 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 tablespoon chili powder
1 teaspoon ground cumin
2 to 4 teaspoons fresh oregano, minced
2 cups vegetable broth
1 (16 ounce) can pinto beans, rinsed and drained
1 (14.5 ounce) can diced tomatoes, juices included
3 to 5 tablespoons canned diced mild green chilies, drained
1/2 tablespoon sugar
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
1/2 cup polenta or coarse-ground yellow cornmeal
Shredded cheddar cheese (optional topping)
University of Rhode Island
The University of Rhode Island is located in Kingston, Rhode Island. I created the following panoramic image on a very cold day on the URI campus. I was standing in the middle of the quad on a slightly raised surface therefore the pano has a bit of an arc. The original image is 16,000 pixels wide. To see a slightly smaller image (3,000 pixels wide), click on the photograph.
University of Arizona MASS
The Department of Multicultural Affairs & Student Success at the University of Arizona sent me a copy of the latest issue of their bi-annual newsletter – Praxis [pdf].
Topics in this edition include:
- Why we still need programs for students who are ethnic minorities
- Exploring power, privilege and oppression with college students
- Dry cleaner parents: hands off, not hovering
- Is there a disability identity?
- Record keeping dilemma: are there multiracial students at the University of Arizona?
- Transformation abroad: encouraging minority students and first generation students to study internationally
