Month: November 2012

In Defense of the Living, Breathing Professor‘

“Crowd-sourcing’ the grading of an essay online is no substitute for thoughtful evaluation by a trained educator.”

     This is an excellent commentary about mass classes published in the Wall Street Journal, of all places.  Have a look:it is all about why good teachers have little to fear form from the current fad in mass internet classes (MOOCS in the current parlance).  The article is written by Adam Falk who is the President of Williams College in Massachusetts, and a Professor of Physics there. …

Jill Koyama from  Educational Anthropolicy, a website created by Jill P. Koyama of SUNY Buffalo.  Like many anthropologists, she is pushing into educational issues here in the United States, and around the world.  She is a sociocultural anthropologist committed to providing a public platform in which anthropologists, educators, and students can engage.

Tony Waters

Tony Waters is czar and editor of Ethnography.com. He came to us from the Sociology department at California State University at Chico where he has been a professor since 1996.

One of the weirdest things for Americans learning German is to know how to say “you.”  Like a number of languages, German has a formal and informal way of saying you, i.e.  the informal “du”, and the Formal “Sie.”  Americans have an aversion to acknowledging social distinctions, which spills into you we think about those we talk with.

I started learning German in 1987 after marrying a German.  It has been a slow haul for my German learning—mostly in the company of family, and friends of my wife. …