Stephen Karlson ponders curriculum reform—in particular, an emphasis on interdisciplinary learning. My knowledge of such matters is necessarily limited—I was not a guinea pig for the integrated first-year curriculum at Rose-Hulman (those of us with high-school calculus were too far along), and I was never a freshman again.

All I’ve gotten so far on Millsaps’ interdisciplinary core is the fluffy, press release material aimed at potential students and parents and anecdotal accounts from various participants (principally, my tour guide during my interview)—I assume it works, since they’ve been doing it for over a decade, but I have no empirical evidence either way. It certainly seems more rigorous than NIU’s approach to the problem, but then again there are advantages in such things to being a selective private school that can restrict its enrollment and worry less about the implications of transfers in or out.

I have two Gmail invites to spare. Email me if you’re interested. All gone!

James Joyner links reviews of C2 by Meryl Yourish and Kevin Aylward.

I gave a fairly positive review to the product last weekend, which seemed to fit the general consensus until Ms. Yourish weighed in.

Update: Steven Taylor asks a question that proves he’s not a cola connoisseur.

My latest little project for Debian is an automatic printer setup tool, built from lots of the bits and pieces I’ve developed for Foomatic-GUI. Details here on debian-devel. Short instructions:

Add this to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://lordsutch.dyndns.org/~cnlawren/printconf/ ./

Then do (as root):

apt-get update; apt-get install printconf

Success or failure reports would be greatly appreciated.