Oh bloggers, how I missed ye.

A lot can happen in a week, no? Egypt is taking it to the streets.  I heard a rumor that Iran might have some unrest of it’s own coming.  By way of a follow-up I saw on HuffPost that Gabrielle Giffords is doing better by the day.  Normally I’d go on about the news a bit but I’m swamped with blogs I want to catch up on.  The Commons news feed is ridiculous these days, there’s so much going on.

First up – If you haven’t been hanging around Carl James Grindley’s page you’ve been missing a really lovely series of poems.  I gotta say, I feel really lucky that the Commons has its own poet laureate hanging around.  Thanks for sharing here Carl.  Your work is especially appreciated in these gloomy winter months.

Benjamin Miller @benmiller314 over at Majoring in Meta returned to the blogs this week with a great post about failure.  I noticed Matt Gold stopped in at the comments but I’d love to see more of a conversation show up over there about failure and the academy.  I can’t help but feel like with all the budget cut axes looming over everything and the general sense across higher education that we’re all skating on thin ice that maybe  it’s about time we dug in a little and sung the praises of making mistakes.  Maybe it’s just me but I get the feeling that mistakes and failures in the sciences still have a rubber floor to fall on. I can’t speak directly about comp/rhet problems, but I can tell you that in religion departments we’re getting a little hysterical.   The thing is, if we’re afraid of failure than we’re afraid of the frontier.  Anyhow, if I keep talking I’ll be dangerously close to turning this into a Ground Control blog.

Speaking of thin ice though – Tony Picciano @Apicciano caught the same article that had my attention the other night.  The NY Times loves the internet, we get that.  The NY Times also loves hanging out of their windows and throwing things at professors.  I feel like this is the third or fourth article I’ve seen in the Times over the last couple of years spelling out just exactly how online education is going to take over the academy.  Stop it.  The robots are not going to start teaching your “Marx, Freud and the History of Suspicion” course.  Parents are not going to pay thousands and thousands of dollars for their kids to be educated by HAL.  We have more to fear from over-zealous red pen wavers afraid of failure than we do from appliances.  At least for now.  Let’s deal with the Terminators when they appear, not with Carnegie Mellon software trials that nobody has the money to buy anyways.

For the record though, this might be what our future robot educators will look like.

Digitocentrism was back with a great post on androids.  Yes, real androids, not the phones.  I totally want to geek out and write many paragraphs on this but I feel like I’d be abusing my great power here at Footenotes.  I’ll take it to the comments.

Did you know we had a yoga contingent on the Commons?  I didn’t!  I’m really glad to see you here.  CUNY Pie was hogging all the attention as the Commons’ token extra-curricular club.

Ok folks, there you have it, the week that was!