Summary: The university’s Trustee governance structure works on a management model that doesn’t seek a lot of input from students, faculty, or the voting public.  For the first time I attended all the open or public* sessions of the Trustees of Indiana University over the two days of their June meeting, held this time on…

Hossein Derakhshan — @h0d3r –has just published an essay that is very specific about the nature of activism, free speech, hyperlinks, and blogging, and also about the stakes for all of us in the way the Web has evolved away from the openness we knew about a decade ago. Like other important pieces of writing,…

Facebook thinks NPR-affiliate WVPE hosts a spam website, I guess, so I have to ask you to click this link to read or hear the essay on Indiana’s walk of shame this spring. The text and audio are here–please click.

Progress continues The effort to make a writer’s Facebook postings also save (or update) to a WordPress blog is moving ahead. Dave Winer’s Little Facebook Editor is testing the concept, and this post was composed on the current version of that software. I like this approach a lot. Why should a writer contribute to a…

One of the great witnesses of the past century, the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, explained in this way the importance of individual voices and traces of particular lives: Unless we can relate it to ourselves personally, history will always be more or less an abstraction and its content the clash of impersonal forces and ideas.…

If you had known her as a child, maybe you would have called her Louise as it says on her birth certificate. But I doubt Lou has let anyone call her Louise since Franklin Roosevelt was president. She is 92 now, retired for a quarter of a century. Before that, she was the kind of…

I’m reading early drafts of short essays written for an English class. They are fine and will grow in revision, so I’m not worried. But they bring to mind the contrast between school essays and the great tradition of the essay as a literary form. School essays show a teacher that a student was paying…

In a key paragraph of a brief Guardian article, Dan Gillmor implies that academics and other kinds of experts should have not an option but a professional obligation to write regularly and clearly for a wider audience than their workplace peers: Another is the value blogging brings to the creators when done right. Blogging has…

In 1973, Pete Seeger seemed to predict the early 21st century, but he was just looking around his society when he wrote: “Americans are drowned in words. . . . We’re also drowned in pictures”. . .more information than we can use, more than we can make sense of, more than we can protect ourselves…

Historian Stephen E. Ambrose may have accidentally put his finger on one of the great flaws of American schools. He took a history class that required each student to do some original research with primary sources, and this insight came to him in the process: “And that just hit me like a sledgehammer,” Ambrose later…