Link Dump

I have several tabbed windows open so that I’ll remember to blog them — so I’ll blog them out now, so I can finally lose the tbas.
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Peter Carrell provided an entry on Cranmer’s “Homily on the Reading of Scripture,” reminding me of his (Cranmer’s, not Peter’s) preface to the Great Bible. Someday I’d love to lead some students through a close reading of early Anglican documents on biblical interpretation, and these texts would be right at the start of the course.
 
Jane (I think) pointed me to Bob Cringely’s scorching warning to the education industry. I don’t think Cringely is quite right about most of what he says, but he’s another witness to the premise that there’s a problem with the current model, wherein the same bodies supervise both instruction and accreditation. The resulting conflict of interests as well as the administrative complications of sustaining both missions may well turn out to be unsupportable over the long run. That doesn’t mean I care less about “standards” — hey, it would be easy to find people who think I’m way too concerned about high standards — but that one of the forces that militates against effective standards-keeping is the entanglement of the standards-bearers of evaluation with the process of instruction (so that in evaluating students, teachers are in a certain way evaluating themselves, so that grade inflation is self-inflation) and its inverse: the tuition-paying students’ expectation that they will emerge with credentials in exchange for their expenditures. I suspect that such tensions and pressures will alter the system in many places (though not everywhere).
 
This is too creepy, especially since I just moved closer to it.
 
John called Margaret’s attention to these terrific hawk-fledging photos from a park in Durham. Where are the hawks in Baltimore?
 
I didn’t get around to obtaining a sip of whisky on my birthday today, as I had been encouraged to do, but I will definitely make a point of exploring this new horizon very soon.