Learning Innovation

Willpower deserves a much bigger cultural footprint than it has so far enjoyed. Some books end up making appearances in all sorts of conversations, spoken about by a diverse range of smart colleagues and friends. Willpower was not one of those books. It deserves to be.

A Q&A about how one college prevents A/V failures.

What can we learn in higher ed from the new TEDBooks initiative? I have no idea, but I do have some questions:

Probably the closest that I'll get to being invited to give a TED Talk is Chris Anderson tweeting about something that I wrote. Last week, in response to my critique that $14.99 is too expensive for a 6 book / 3 month TED book subscription (through TED's new iOS app), Chris tweeted from @TEDchris, "Is $15 too much for 22 short, multimedia enabled books?! http://bit.ly/NNXitg http://bit.ly/Njqo1c"

Currency is truly an anachronism. We continue to hold on to our paper money and our coins because - well because why?

My wife and I were both born in 1969. Here is a short list of debacles, missteps, and failures that we've witnessed in our time on the planet: stagflation, the energy crisis (gas lines), the tech bubble, the 2nd Iraq war, the housing bubble, and the great recession (and you can add to this list). Another way we could describe the past 40 or so years, if feeling negative, could be: rising inequality, stagnant real wages, rapid increases in health care and education costs, growth in structural unemployment/underemployment, and political polarization and ineffectiveness in the face of these challenges.

Does it even make sense to think about Brazil and India together, China and Russia? Jim O'Neill has been dining out (or traveling about) on his BRIC concept for years - and has even extended this framework to the "Next Eleven" (Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, Turkey, and Vietnam).

I am writing this public letter to you in response to your NYTimes op-ed piece of 7/19 "The Trouble With Online Education." My motivations for writing are not our disagreements, which are substantial and detailed below, but rather what we (and I suspect many of the readers of this letter) share in common.