Archives
Bullying, the market for education and the damaged quest for learning
Posted on September 11, 2014 2 Comments
A recent study found looked into the experience of cyberbullying by university professors at the hands of their students. This disturbing phenomenon points to much larger issues beyond mental health promotion and calls into question many of the assumptions we have about the systems we’ve designed to foster education and what it means to be a […]
Defining the New Designer
Posted on August 8, 2013 3 Comments
It’s been suggested that anyone who shapes the world intentionally is a designer, however those who train and practice as professional designers question whether such definition obscures the skill, craft, and ethics that come from formal disciplinary affiliation. Further complicating things is the notion that design thinking can be taught and that the practice of […]
Scaling Education: The Absurd Case of the MOOC
Posted on July 19, 2013 2 Comments
The MOOC offers enormous potential to re-shape the way people learn and promoting access to content and expertise that many in this world could have only dreamed of years ago. But the naivete that such learning can be done in an monocultural way without losing something special about the context in which people learn and use what they learn might lead to some expensive lessons.
Much Ado About MOOC
Posted on February 8, 2013 1 Comment
It’s fair to imagine that one of the 2013 ‘words of the year‘ will be MOOC (which is not really a word, but an acronym that stands for Massive Open Online Course). It seems that everywhere you look in the higher education and professional development space we are seeing MOOC’s talked about and debated. HBR […]
The Quality Metric in Education
Posted on January 15, 2013 1 Comment
What is quality when we speak of learning? In this third post in series on education and evaluation metrics the issue of quality is within graduate and professional education is explored with more questions than answers about the very nature of learning itself. But what does learning really mean and do we set the system up […]
The Knowledge Metric in Education
Posted on January 9, 2013 5 Comments
Higher education is asking itself some big questions and making substantive changes to the way it sees itself and produces value for society. Education is increasingly being rationalized, which calls into question the metrics that are being used to judge how resources should be allocated. In a previous post, I looked at the jobs metric. […]
The Job Market Metric In Education
Posted on December 30, 2012 2 Comments
Post-secondary and continuing education is continuing to be rationalized in ways that are transforming the very foundation of the enterprise. Funding is a major driver of change in this field: how much is available, when it flows, where it comes from, what is funded, and who gets the funding are questions on the minds of […]
Rationalized Education and The Futures of the University
Posted on December 26, 2012 4 Comments
Next to the church, the university may be the most enduring formal institution in our society. And like nearly every institution from banking to manufacturing to healthcare and even the church, the university is facing a major disruption from social and technological change. The church’s (simplified) purpose is to provide a place of worship, communion […]
Advice for a Scholar Seeking a Life in Academia
Posted on December 18, 2011
The need to train professionals, educate citizens and advance knowledge of our world has never been less, yet the academic environment where this takes place is changing at a pace where its easy to question what one is to do to contribute to its mission. In this continuing series on life in academia, I offer […]
(Un)Building a Mystery: Peeking Behind the Curtain in the Academic Land of Oz
Posted on December 16, 2011 1 Comment
The gap between what academics do and what those outside of the academy think they do is enormous. The mysteriousness and elite status that universities enjoy may actually serve to undermine the very values of inquiry and education that it seeks to promote. In this second in series of posts on academic life, I take […]
