Author Archives: jbj

IT outside the classrooms and dorms

We have a new IT governance committee* on our campus, thanks to lots of arm-twisting by the CIO, and some (ongoing) redefining of the faculty senate’s information technology committee.  (For background, see these two pdfs.)  What’s interesting about this committee … Continue reading

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Easy withdrawals from the Bank of America on West Main

From yesterday’s New Britain Herald:  A brazen bank robber pulled off a drive-through heist at the Bank of America on West Main Street Monday afternoon by making a “significant threat of violence,” police said. Police declined to comment on the … Continue reading

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Dickens in glass

A nearby town, Vernon, has Dickens Days every year: a holiday celebration loosely organized around a Victorian theme.  Students in my Victorian novel class could get extra credit if they went and could prove it.  (In the interests of anthropology, … Continue reading

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Playing with Blogs: Links for Student Learning Colloquium at CCSU

(This isn’t quite my slide presentation, but a list related resources.  Here’s the slide presentation itself.) It’s nice to start with an epigraph.  Here’s Jo Guldi on what humanities pedagogy could look like today:  A characterization of humanities pedagogy based … Continue reading

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Lesser-Known Characters from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol

I am a sucker for Dickens-related holiday humor, and so can’t help linking to Yankee Pot Roast’s   (even if it is a year old).

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Keep your money in the community

A local blogger is reporting that a New Britain Herald reporter was arrested over the weekend on DUI & drug charges.  I’m not one to moralize when someone’s down, and in general I have a fairly libertarian take on the … Continue reading

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Dreaming of a handwriting-free future

I have terrible handwriting.  This doubtless follows from various moral failings, but it is literally true that I was never properly taught cursive handwriting: I was promoted out of 2nd grade, when they were first starting to teach it, and … Continue reading

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Hunger in New Britain

New Britain is a very poor town, and, judging by this Courant article’s reporting, one wracked by hunger.  On the one hand, there’s a lot of anecdote here; on the other, this is an emergency in the making, and it’s … Continue reading

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Ruining the good Jones name

The NY Times this morning ran a story about the least sympathetic Joneses of the current recession: Meet the Joneses, two Silicon Valley engineers who, in many ways, seem to have it all — a home they bought for $850,000, … Continue reading

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See? Neal Stephenson uses the OED!

One of the most weirdly difficult battles I have with students, taken as a group, is to get them to replace dictionary.com with the OED (freely available online through the school).  Despite all the informational advantages of the latter, and … Continue reading

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