Happy New Year to all Kindlers! I have been checking out some of the best edu-bloggers over the holidays and want to make a few recommendations for the new year. These should be exciting times in education with a new administration in Washington and tough economic times around the country. Maybe the time is right for the inherent economies of the Kindle to catch on…;-) (Seriously, there will be many, many more Kindles at work in schools by the end of 2009 than there are today–you heard it here first!)
So, as an educator, what blogs should you fire up on the Kindle? First, I am going to recommend a blog that you can access through the Kindle Store, meaning that each time a post is made you will have it formatted and sent wirelessly to your Kindle to read at your leisure. The blog is called “Think Again,” and it appears in the New York Times blogs every Sunday. The author is Stanley Fish, a fellow whom I came to read as an undergraduate when I studied Milton. The book is named Surprised by Sin, and you can tell from the title that Fish is a bit of an iconoclast. He’s a good writer, too.
His posts range from dealing with customer service at ATT to a new “prose” translation of Milton’s Paradise Lost (done on the premise that the poem is so dense that readers need a translation from the poem’s original language–English).
But Fish’s primary target is the topic of academic freedom, and, in a series of posts last fall, he took up the issue of whether or not professors and other teachers should be allowed to wear campaign buttons to class, or display political bumper stickers on their cars. Does the title of Fish’s latest book–Save the World on Your Own Time–give you a hint as to Fish’s opinion?
This is Kindle blog-reading at its best.