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
October 15th, 2012 at 4:21AM
I’ll defer to UD and other profs on the influence of all this electronic stuff on learning, professor-pupil relations, etc.
I admit I hop onto the computer with the same zeal I used to crack a world almanac when I was a youngster. Lots of disparate info about everything. Pleasurable scanning. I’m not sure I was learning, in the sense of exploring new and unfamiliar patterns of thought (calculus, English lit, etc.). More like cataloging.
FWIW, I attended a local civic meeting a while back where a handful of people I knew slightly immediately opened their laptops. Trust me–they were doing nothing of consequence with those laptops, their apps, and what-not.
October 15th, 2012 at 9:09AM
The main issue here is that some things demand close attention, and some don’t. It’s perfectly possible to use a computer in various ways while watching just about any TV show, including the news, and especially sports. But it turns out that listening to a lecture, much less actually participating in a class, isn’t much like watching TV. I suspect that this is true even when the lecture/class is on a screen.
October 15th, 2012 at 9:36AM
Some activities inherently require multitasking…for example, a pilot may be talking to an air traffic controller, adjusting the engine mixture, scanning for traffic, and actually controlling the airplane, all at once. But I suspect multitasking works much better when the tasks all have something to do with one another, in this case the safety of the flight….talking to a friend on the phone about non-aviation matters would, I suspect, be much more disruptive to the other tasks than talking to a controller about a change in altitude requested.
I also wonder about the interaction of multitasking and emotions. The very term multitasking is a computer-industry term, and computers/software don’t have any emotions (though they do lose a certain amount of efficiency when rapidly switching from task to task.) I’d hypothesize that the amount of time necessary to establish a new emotional context is significantly greater than the amount of time necessary to establish a new intellectual context. And emotions tend to direct attention. So the interaction between what the student is (supposedly) learning in class and what he is reading on his computer screen may involve a diffusion of emotional focus as well as of intellectual attention.
October 15th, 2012 at 10:51AM
Much to think about there, david.
October 15th, 2012 at 7:59PM
I see, so notetaking no longer involves compression and restatement as it did in ye olden days? Thinking, listening and notetaking is pure, unadulterated transcription, a download of the immortal wisdom dispensed by a professor?
This is making a fetish of the 140 characters, and of the act of publishing or disseminating them. If I could show you the notes of a smart student who aphoristically reassembled a lecture or discussion into broken sections of 140, 150, 160, 200 characters each, you would discount the first of the four and praise the latter as thoughtful and uncontaminated by technology?
You are fond of pointing to blindspots, but I think you have one too: a tendency to attribute to technology what is really attributable to bad thinking and bad faith. The latter flourish (and flourished perfectly well in the absence of information technology, even if they’re inclined to cite the technology as justification or vindication.
October 17th, 2012 at 9:37PM
Tim reads this as meaning that the student is tweeting about the content of the lecture (and thus this is a variation of the debate as to whether conference presentations should be tweeted). My reading of the cited passage (and the original piece) is that the student is referring to tweeting which has nothing to do with the lecture. Perhaps this doesn’t make a difference. I think it does.