21st Century Scholar

As this blog is being published, I find it amusingly coincidental that I am traveling through some of the United States’ most earthquake-prone areas to get to the USRio+2.0 Conference: Center for Social Innovation (CSI) at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. It is a conference that is co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of State that [...]

Peter Scott uses the metaphor of “the angle of repose” in his nice new book, Harnessing America’s Wasted Talent. The angle of repose is an engineering term, but I know it as the title of a book by one of my favorite authors, Wallace Stegner. In engineering an “angle of repose” is the angle at [...]

This is the first of a two-part blog where I discuss the use of social media in research and practice. Today’s blog emphasizes methodological concerns. Next week, I will discuss social media in schools. As regular readers of the blog know, I am conducting an ethnography that focuses on the lives of 17- and 18-year-old [...]

Recently, a friend asked us for a loan. This is someone we have known for a long time and because of the vagaries of the stock market and a downturn in the economy he has seen his savings diminish at the same time as he lost his job. The prospects in this economy for a [...]

The proverbial buck stops with the President. More than any other lesson learned here is that the President and Board failed. If the President was not fully briefed and informed about the events then he managed a slipshod operation and should have been removed. If he did know what was going on and engaged in [...]

When the athletic director and the vice president heard from Paterno about the alleged rape, they certainly did not appear to act with determination or forceful deliberation. The concerns about Mr. Sandusky also had surfaced prior to Paterno’s meeting with them. We are in a litigious environment and I suspect that one hesitation may have [...]

Recall that before I was at ‘SC I earned tenure and promotion at Penn State. During my first year there I went to lunch at the Nittany Lion Inn, a faculty club of sorts that always made me feel as if I was sitting at the adults’ table. One day I was in the outer [...]

Let me begin with the 28-year-old graduate student who supposedly saw Mr. Sandusky violating a young boy in the showers late at night. This incident was the easiest for commentators to state what they would have done. Whether it was MSNBC or Fox, The Washington Post or The New York Time, we had everyone claiming [...]

I have refrained from writing or speaking about the events at Penn State because I needed time to process what we might learn from such a tragedy. When the events were unfolding a bunch of reporters called me for a quick quote and I declined saying anything in large part because there was too much [...]

In late December, Collegeology game designers Elizabeth Swensen, Sean Bouchard and I traveled to Texas  to conduct a case study at a Houston area high school. Our goal was to playtest the card game (Application Crunch) and soon-to-be launched online game (Mission: Admission) with a group of predominately African American, low-income students. We arrived right [...]