Loan Me A Dime
Released in 1969, “Loan Me A Dime” appeared on the second album by Boz Scaggs. Controversy of whether Scaggs gave appropriate credit to Fenton Robinson, who released his signature piece “Somebody Loan Me A Dime” in 1967, still abounds. Despite the controversy, this song was a favorite of my friends and a welcome change to the 2-3 minute cuts designed for mainstream radio play. While he is not featured in the video below, Duane Allman joined Scaggs on the original, album version of the...
Read MoreClough Commons Art Crawl
The 1st Annual Clough Commons Art Crawl was held on 10 February 2012 on the Georgia Tech campus. The event featured a diverse range of student artwork including drawings, paintings, sculpture, photography, poetry and prose, music, digital art, spoken word, and performance art. In our office, the Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning, we had the pleasure of turning our reception area into a mini-gallery for the event (Image #1). As you will see from the slideshow, Georgia Tech students find time to create interesting pieces of art and demonstrate that Tech students excel in areas beyond engineering. Click on the first image to enter a full-size slideshow, then navigate using the arrow keys. [Show as slideshow]
Read MoreIMRaD Organization
Arrangement (taxis) is one of the classical canons of rhetoric and was the topic of our discussion in last night’s academic writing course. In my preparation for the class I found the following by George Kennedy in his commentary preceding Aristotle’s chapter on arrangement in On Rhetoric: An effective speech follows a structural pattern; that is, it consists of parts, each performing some function, but joined together into an artistic unity. After substituting the term “paper” for “speech” in the quote above, the passage served to frame my lecture and our conversation about a popular structural template for writing in engineering and science. The IMRaD structure, or organizational pattern, represents the major sections of an...
Read MoreThe Tree of LIfe
Since my work and education fall within the humanities, I had to check with a colleague who teaches quantitative methods that the correct term to describe a distribution with two distinct peaks was indeed a “bimodal” distribution. She said an extreme example would be a class where about half of the students received an “A” for the course and the other half an “F.” I recently encountered a bimodal distribution when I visited Amazon.com to order the Blu-ray version of the film, “The Tree of Life.” Looking at the customer reviews, I discovered about half gave the film 5 stars and the other half 1 star. Some even suggested a new category, “O stars.” I’m not sure if Terrence Malick was going for a...
Read MoreCommunication Certificate
A short time after beginning my new position as a communication skills specialist for the Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL) at Georgia Tech, I was invited to join a collaborative effort that was in the final stages of implementing a communication certificate program for graduate students. The program’s website identifies the various constituencies that collaborated in the development of the program: The Graduate Communication Certificate Program is sponsored by Graduate SGA and the Georgia Tech Library (Faculty Engagement Department), in collaboration with the Communication Center, the Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL), Career Services, and Communications & Marketing. ...
Read MoreAbout Me
Dave Lawrence works for the Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is a Communication Skills Specialist and earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in Communication from The Ohio State University.