Kevin Gannon

A few days ago, news broke in the higher-ed sphere about a new paper in the Educational Psychology Review, “How Much Mightier Is the Pen Than the Keyboard for Note-Taking? A Replication and Extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014),” which seemed to undercut a study that’s become the go-to for those in favor of unilateral technology bans in the college classroom. The Mueller and Oppenheimer paper  purported to show students who took class notes in longhand performed better[] than those who used laptops

Skip to content Earlier this week, a cool Twitter thread happened, started by @_Varsha_Venkat’s query to historians about any pivotal, paradigm-shifting (for them) books they’d read #twitterstorians, what is one book that changed how you looked at the discipline? — varsha venkat, or varsha as i call her (@_varsha_venkat) January 28, 2019 A great discussion broke out in the replies, as one would expect when a bunch of historians are asked about books. I learned all sorts of things: very few historians write as well as William Cronin did, for example, and a lot of the books that changed our view of the discipline weren’t in our specific subfields or areas of expertise

By now, all of the higher-education world is familiar with the saga of Silent Sam, a statue of a Confederate soldier erected on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1913. As a symbol of the racist history of the South’s effort to create a slaveholders’ nation, the statue has been (accurately) characterized as being entirely inappropriate for the campus of a purportedly modern university

The fear that hangs over all of my writing is that I will never finish the big projects. Actually, it’s even worse than that: I fear not knowing how to finish