April 20, 2013:  AACC Is The Place For The Helpful Courseware Man

Off to the American Association of Community Colleges Conference (AACC) in San Francisco today.  The jingle for ACE Hardware will not go away.  Then again, I have known a few tools in my time in academia.

So I give in:  What do I want to buy from my neighborhood hardware/college improvement store?

• Paint to apply a new coat to make some shabby, old practices look new again.
• A wrench to apply necessary pressure to get some old practices changed.
• A ladder to give my colleagues who would like to at least reach a glass ceiling.
• A wheelbarrow to cart the manure around.
• A shovel for the corners of those corner offices where the wheelbarrow won't reach.
• Duct tape to cheaply cover holes in our curricula.
• A crowbar to move some generally immovable faculty and administrators.

On a different note, but related to acronyms, I link again on the left to the WCAC/QuAAC files (Wack and Quack), pieces co-written several years ago with my good friend, Gary Franchy, that highlight Writing and Communicating Across the Curriuculm (WCAC) and Quantitative Analysis Across the Curriculum (QuAAC) topics.  We relived a couple of these on Facebook this week, and a lot of good memories came out as I re-read these.