Inside Higher Ed. has an article about an anthropology professor who decided to go "undercover" as a freshman. The article is generating a lot of comments, and I am in the process of getting a review copy for TCR.

Odyssey, a program on Chicago Public Radio, may be an interesting source to bring into our conversation about the edLab Seminar. The host of the show (supported by her team of PhDs) interviews leading academics every week. Torey Malatia, the president and general manager of Chicago Public Radio describes the show in the following way: "Talk radio has a reputation for being either inflammatory or pretentious. Odyssey moves this format in a new direction by providing a forum for the best minds in fields as diverse as politics, science, culture, philosophy, law, and the arts to engage in insightf...

What can we do to be more service-oriented? I was at Starbucks this weekend, and someone got their drink before me, even though they were behind me in line. When the Starbucks employee realized her mistake, she immediately gave me my four dollar drink for free, even though I didn't express any indignation at having to wait an extra thirty seconds for my latte. Will this make me choose Starbucks in the future if I can get the same drink at Wal-Mart for one dollar? I don't know. Even though I don't really have anything to support this claim, I feel that service and design are going to become ...

EdWeek announced that they will begin charging (non-print subscribers) for their content and their daily news section. It will be interesting to see what develops. A competitor EducationNews.org will not charge members. Which model will be more successful? This may provide some interesting data for looking at our own low cost publishing model.

I read the beginning of a poorly written book: "The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, & Consciousness" by Virginia Postrel. The thesis of the book was interesting: People care about design; style is essential to being human. She argues: Though it is important that a product is cheap, and that a product functions, consumers take how an object is designed more and more seriously. Thus she concludes: 2000-2010 was going to be the design decade. The book was terrible to read, and I only got past the first 15 pages. But, within the opening pages, the...