Blogs

The OECD reports that four out of ten university graduates in the world will come from China or India by 2020 — and a major part of global enrolment is taking place in these two countries. This trend is an inevitable and entirely natural result of the global expansion of higher education — massification, population trends, and the growth of the economies of both countries.

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).

When I think of summer, I think of reading. Not of assigned "summer reading," though I'm sure I did my share of that, but of long, lazy days spent moving from one spot to another, nose in book, immersed.

Universities, like other high profile service organizations, continuously seek visibility and preeminence to validate their claims of significance and advertise...

The normally sober Tim Burke had a bit of a meltdown on his blog about MOOCs and their attendant hype. (MOOCs are Massively Open Online Courses, such as the ones offered through Coursera.) He rightly called out the techno-utopians for their eager willingness to believe that the latest techno-toy will Change Everything, and offered helpful reminders of previous techno-toys that were supposed to Change Everything, and didn’t. (Sunrise Semester, anyone?)

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.

It's been a long eight weeks. But I'm back, and I have a few thoughts to ease myself back into blogging.

Inspired by this post by my virtual colleague at the University of Venus, I decided that once again I will address the issue of the importance of reading. At first glance, my statement sounds like an ’ideological’ statement, but it is far from being one. As someone used to reading as much as possible, regardless of the domain of study (but especially political science and history books), I find it very often painful to discover that books do not play an important role in the life and time management plans of many current students, future intellectuals and elites.