A couple of years ago I was asked by the University of Prince Edward Island to write a short piece about its founding in the early 1970s. The eventual product was a 9,000-word, 48-page booklet - not my magnum opus, but a nice little effort, I thought, and an always welcome addition to my ISBN life list.

"The old way is no more. " That quote from this new book could also be the subtitle for Teaching, Learning, Assessing: A Guide for Effective Teaching at College and University, edited by Kara Smith, professor of education at the University of Windsor.

In 1866, the Société de Linguistique in Paris banned all papers on the origin of language and on universal language. The scholarly world honoured the ban worldwide for over a century, until the topic was reopened at the New York Academy of Sciences in 1975.

Last week I sat down with some local high school social studies teachers to talk about preparing students for university. Realizing that they might be flashing back to their own time in university, as I was about high school, I put them at ease by dressing like a professor of the early 1990s. 

It's that time of year again when students prepare to fill out their course evaluations. No matter how confident I've become with my teaching, the drill remains a source of consternation.

Manitoba recently reported the findings of its Survey of Early Leavers, involving almost 1,500 full-time university and college students who dropped out before completing their program. In any given year, about one-quarter of the province's undergraduates become "early leavers," so the study was an opportunity to better understand a situation with a presumably significant social cost.

I teach a social psychology course to hundreds of students. Over the years the most dramatic change in the classroom auditorium is the dominance of technology.