Notes from the classroom

Hello 2021: A new year — some old reflections:

It’s a new year and a new beginning … or possibly another repeat. A challenge at the start of a new year is to remember the pledges and resolutions from last year. Much depends on perspective. Some resolutions never made sense in 2020 or before: Be a better person, exercise more, eat less, talk more or less, write letters, visit parents, and you know — all those things that you

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Leaning on a class to make sense

Every fall semester I teach one of my classes in English, with about 20-30 foreign students visiting our university for a semester. We had our first meeting yesterday. And as always I wonder before class starts whether there is enough in the chosen lecture theme to get them out there on the floor, debating. They need to. A class with 55-60 students total and where no one talks for an

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Arthur C. Clarke on Education

There is a university that most of us have never heard of, unless you have reason to, or come from a place near by; it is called the University of Moratuwa. At one point in time it was known as the Ceylon College of Technology. If from Sri Lanka, certainly if from Sri Lanka, you will know of the many prizes students from this university have won in international competitions

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We are the world, right?

Notes from the classroom: The importance of being there A lecture with my international students sums up this week, for me. I teach a course in global political communication. I have about eight different nationalities in my class. And this week we were to talk about how the international media frame and cultivate the theme of “global survival issues”; like poverty, climate change, ethnic class division and locked-in despair. Does it

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