Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte
September 15th, 2011 at 9:46AM
Lots of people talk up how “great” clickers are, but to me, they just seem…I don’t know, so…programmed? Like rats in a cage pushing levers for a pellet.
Why can’t we just TALK to our students any more to try to find out what they do and don’t know? I’m not at all fond of the current mania for constant numerical assessment.
September 15th, 2011 at 6:13PM
From later in the editorial:
“Rather than having clicker responses account for most of the points in the class, professors ought to use them for polling responses and engaging students throughout the lecture to grasp their full understanding or misunderstanding of what is being taught.
It is wonderful that in a class of 200 students, a professor can monitor what each student understands or needs help in; this interaction usually only happens with smaller classes.
If professors instead use the clickers for students to provide feedback on what information they understand or what information they would like more explanation on, then clickers can help guide the class in the direction they need to go.”
I teach larger classes (60-100 students) and use clickers for attendance. I schedule 2-3 questions per 50 minute session so that they have to respond every 15-20 minutes. I want to keep them focused and I want to see how much material they are absorbing. If students do gather up piles of clickers so that their friends get credit, good for them. It’s only worth 2.5% of their grade. Some students will always find a way to cheat. But in my experience, judging by the number of clicker responses and how full the classroom is, the large majority of students aren’t doing that. The point is, this is just a tool, like every other piece of technology. There is a place for it in education.
September 16th, 2011 at 10:26AM
My experience fits with Rosemary’s. They’re terrible if you actually give texts or graded quizzes with them, but as a tool “engag[e] students throughout the lecture to grasp their full understanding or misunderstanding of what is being taught” it works fairly well.
There’s still the issue of students claiming attendance when they aren’t there, but I find those students will fail the tests anyway.
Not that I like clickers, but when you have to deal with a large lecture class, they’re a decent tool. But using them for graded quizzes or tests? Bad idea.
September 18th, 2011 at 2:48AM
I must be rather un-modern, but I’ve never used “clicker” devices. I’ve heard them being used in larger classes to do some mini-quizzes to raise attention during the lectures (the professor describes a problem and proposes several possible solutions).
If we really need to check attendance, we have students sign on a roll call.