In late March, I presented to about 150 attendees of the HighEdWeb New England conference at Mt. Holyoke College. My topic: how to plan and run an effective livestream fundraising event. This is something we’ve had a chance to do at Bates for the last two years, and it’s been very successful for us. It […]
Reply All is my favorite podcast. It bills itself as “a show about the internet.” The latest episode is about diversity in Silicon Valley, approached through the lens of a black engineer who recently quit his job at Twitter. It is fascinating and absolutely worth a listen. One of my favorite parts is an example […]
A couple weeks ago, Bates College was on The Simpsons. I found out on a Sunday evening via Facebook, where a friend mentioned he had just seen the show poking fun at Bates. Next, I checked Yik Yak, where some of our students were talking about seeing it as well. Because Simpsons episodes and clips […]
Watching a tragedy unfold from the other side of the world can at once be deeply moving and terribly frustrating. It can be hard to know what to do, how to react. Even if the events have no tangible, concrete effect on your day-to-day life, the urge to express empathy with the victims can be […]
I was very sorry to learn that legendary font designer Adrian Frutiger passed away on September 10. After a somewhat painstaking process of research and testing, last month we finally switched to his “Neue Frutiger” as our sans serif font on bates.edu. The response has been very positive, and I love seeing it there every […]
I have been thinking about this phrase today. It comes to me from a lesson imparted to campers at the summer camp I attended as a boy and worked at into my twenties. Here’s how it is presented there: Be kind. Do at least one act of unbargaining service each day. I have always really […]
We’ve all seen it by now: the ubiquitous three-lined icon known as “the hamburger” (or, to a jocular few, “Mr. Liney“). Increasingly, we are all coming to know what it means, too: click for menu. Usability studies continue to show that the hamburger image has still not crossed the familiarity tipping point, however. So gurus […]