It was a very busy weekend for us that started last Friday (04/13) evening. That was Tamil New Year . Since we follow a lunar calendar, the exact dates when this happens fluctuates. We have actually stopped celebrating many of these holidays that were the source of real excitement when we were growing up. This time around, an association we belong to in CT had arranged for an evening of celebration. We attended the function and had a great time. We watched a “drama” by a famous group from India. A silly comedy that required a lot of local knowledge about Tamil Nadu where we all belong to. Thanks to the Web and internet, we keep up enough to be able to relate to all the jokes. Saturday was a beautiful day and I golfed with friends from Wesleyan and Sunday we drove all the way to Hanover, NH to visit our son, have a meal, catch up and return!
In between all of this, I was following the happenings on in the world and most notably, a piece in NY Times titled “Where your Money Goes?” where Jane Wellman, who was part of the Delta Project concerned with the cost of Higher Education, was discussing ways to curb the cost of Higher Ed. I was also following the tweets from many that I follow who were at the NITLE Summit. Particularly interesting were the tweets regarding the Digital Humanities. In my humble opinion, in both of these cases, the topic is of utmost importance, but key players are missing. We can have a lot of brainstorming and generate creative solutions and ideas whether it is about reducing the cost of higher education through the use of technologies or Digital Humanities projects, but without the faculty and students participating in these discussions, these are unlikely to go too far. This is why the discussions on Digital Media and Quantitative Analysis Initiative that were part of the Liberal Arts Learning in the Digital Age Symposium were great – participants were faculty and in one case a student. (more…)
One more weekend of Football is out of the way. I thought Patriots played a sloppy game and thanks to their defense and a missed field goal by the Ravens, they will be playing in Superbowl. The hype of the Patriots/Giants Superbowl rematch is on full swing and the whole Tom Coughlin/Bill Belichick relationship while they were both assistant coaches with the Giants is back in the limelight. Bill Belichick is a Wesleyan Alum, class of ’75, and has explained how he applies what he learned in College in NFL. I am really looking forward to an exciting Superbowl a couple of weeks from now. We have a big party planned in our house and the Giants fans amongst our visitors have back row seats with heat turned down and will be served warm beer while we in the front row seat will enjoy the warmth, better food and nice cold beer. For that one day, I don’t mind being called a bad host by a few!
As we begin the Spring semester, I am happy to talk about something that has been in the works for quite some time. It is a fact that technologies are coming at us at a rapid pace and they are changing the landscape in Higher Ed in ways that no one every anticipated. On the one hand, Higher Ed institutions have been the most influential in terms of research and development and through those, have affected tremendous changes in the world. On the other hand, they have also been very resistent to changes when it comes to teaching, learning and research, all for good reasons. As Larry Summers wrote in his NY Times piece recently “My predecessor as Harvard president, Derek Bok, famously compared the difficulty of reforming a curriculum with the difficulty of moving a cemetery.” I believe that we need a strategy and an ongoing plan that prepares the College for the changes in technologies and how it affects the Library and the College’s core academic mission. And we want to do develop this plan not in isolation, but in collaboration with the faculty, students, staff and the alumnae.
We have planned a symposium series for the Spring titled “Liberal Arts Learning in the Digital Age” to facilitate these conversations.
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