Category Archives: Uncategorized

Temple’s Tiny Libraries

Many events in Philadelphia are centered around the one book, one Philadelphia program. To encourage students to attend these events we need to get them to read the book, which in 2022 is Quiara Alegría Hudes’ memoir, My Broken Language. … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Academic Wordle

Like so many others, I have been caught up in the daily word puzzle Wordle. a craze covered in the New Yorker, and one that earned its creator a tidy sum when the New York Times purchased the rights.  Inspired … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Reported student workload in General Education

It is a common student lament: “A friend of mine is taking the same class from a different teacher and she has far fewer readings and papers.”  We’ve all heard it. Maybe we made similar complaints when we were college … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Musings on AGU in New Orleans and Funding Professional Societies

Funding Professional Societies I didn’t attend the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Society (AGU) this year, but my graduate student, Gina Pope, went and had a fabulous time in New Orleans despite continuing worries over the pandemic. But something … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

A Summer Workshop On Proximal and Remote Sensing for Soil Investigations

In some ways, the virtual conferences that arose from necessity out of the pandemic are a boon for science.  No travel increases foreign participation and, arguably, student participation as well. A case in point is the upcoming symposium Application of … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Back in the field again!

It’s 2021; the weather is warming; people are getting vaccinated — time to start fieldwork again! This past week I went into the field with my graduate students Bojan Milinic and Gina Pope to install Terros-12 soil sensors at a … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Data Lakes, Ponds, and Puddles

  Using the cute little graphic above, Amazon web services define a data lake as: “… a centralized repository that allows you to store all your structured and unstructured data at any scale. You can store your data as-is, without … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Scanning Student Course Feedback for Outliers

The debate has raged for decades over the best use of student course feedback, or indeed, whether it should be used at all. Detractors cite studies that show racial and gender bias. Proponents argue that the student voice should be … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Case for Course Consistency

GenEd courses come up for recertification every five years. Faculty reviewers read the instructor’s narrative, examine syllabi of all the course sections, look at assignment prompts, review samples of student work, check on section sizes and instructor support — a … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Hybrid, virtual, and asynchronous…Oh, my!

(image: https://onestop.utsa.edu/registration/class-schedule/modality/) Remember when there were two types of classes, online and in-person? Online and in-person gave birth to three children: hybrid, asynchronous, and virtual.  In Temple parlance, a hybrid class has an online component and an in-person component. An … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment