Four years of academic blogging: What I have learned so far

I put up my first blog post on April 28th 2017. In the previous 24 hours, I had seen the explosion of media coverage and public engagement about the first Cerutti Mastodon paper in Nature. I went to the original paper, and I knew that as an academic and as a teacher, I had to…

Thoughts on the post-pandemic university: A learning commons

We must reimagine university teaching and learning for a pandemic and post-pandemic world. Instead of seeing our campuses as assemblages of rooms in which sections are taught and exams are held, we should view them as learning commons in which learning and assessment are facilitated. We don’t need to create a course schedule for the…

Comment on Somerville et al. (2021) on the possibility of 30k year old archaeological material in the Tehuacan Valley, Mexico

Somerville et al. (2021) recently raise the possibility in Latin American Antiquity of 30k year old archaeological material at Coxcatlan cave in the Tehuacan Valley of Mexico. This one isn’t making much of a splash in the media (so far), and I suspect that is because it is actually cautious and very appropriately presented. At…