Whodunnit, Cyber Style
This has been an important week for cyber security. As one colleague suggested to me, we may look back on this week as the time when our government finally started to take the constant cyber…
The First Christmas As a Social Media Event
No doubt, many of you have already seen this video. After all, it is four years old, and it has over 12 million views on YouTube. I saw it for the very first time right…
Who Creates the Course Syllabus?
I recently completed teaching 21st Century American Fiction, a variation on the many Introduction to Fiction courses that I have taught. As I told my students on the first day, I could teach the course…
Unencrypted Patient Data Stolen … Ruh Roh
A laptop containing data on 2,800 patients at Northwestern Memorial Health Care was stolen this week. According to a report, the laptop was password-protected but not encrypted. Put simply, that means that 2,800 student records are…
Cuba Libre: Fall of another Wall!
There is a lot more to US-Cuban relations than the fifty odd years of an embargo. It is easy to get fixated on US-Cuban conflicts in terms of a Cold War vocabulary. Fidel and Raul…
The Interview: The Fallout
The Sony hacking scandal in the wake of the comedy The Interview is alarming, not because it has caused the demise of a single movie, but because it suggests that, unless we get a dose of…
Why Choose Teaching as a Career?
As students enter their last year of high school and begin, or continue, searching colleges and universities, one question they are asking themselves and others is what should I study? Many high school students consider…
Who Wants To Read about a 68 year-old White Guy?
Well I do, and did, because ….I’m a 68 year old white guy. The subject in question is Frank Bascombe, the narrator of Richard Ford’s Let Me be Frank with You. I enjoyed this latest…
Teaching as the Act of Building Community
I just completed a semester during which I taught two classes, Theology of Pastoral Ministry and Practicing Faithful Justice: Faith Behind Bars. Each one tapped a different aspect of my expertise, learning and practical experience. …
An Hour of Code == An Hour of Fun
During Computer Science Education Week, nearly 75 million people around the globe spent an hour of their time learning how to write computer code. Some wrote a line or two, while some wrote tens or…