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Like many of you, I took the time to print out and carefully read Lev Gonick's essay "The Year Ahead in IT, 2013". The entire essay is worth spending time with, as you will find a number of challenging ideas and insights embedded in Gonick's writing.

What did you do yesterday? I can tell you exactly what I did, because it's the same way I spend almost all my time as a graduate student.

Since moving to one of the most expensive housing markets in North America eight years ago, we’ve had to learn...

Just before the holidays, I started reading about the teaching power of stories. That's "stories" in the sense that probably first popped into your mind -- enthralling tales of interesting characters facing challenges in pursuit of a goal. Children learn to understand pattern, cause-and-effect, motivation, etc., not by having these things explained to them in some form of abstract exposition -- children learn these things (and many more) by seeing/hearing/vicariously experiencing them in action. Along the way, their brains learn to expect a certain sort of information in a certain form, and configure themselves to process and store such information efficiently. Memory works by story. Our lives work by stories.

Over the break, I had a welcome chance to catch up on my reading. Through the miracle of Twitter -- which I think of as an annotated bibliography that self-updates in real time -- I ran across these two articles, and couldn’t help noticing how they crash into each other.

Michael Feldstein is "an educational technology consultant and a lifelong educator," with previous gigs as "senior program manager of MindTap at Cengage Learning and principal product strategy manager for Academic Enterprise Solutions (formerly Academic Enterprise Initiative, or AEI) at Oracle." He is also a terrific speaker (recommend Michael for any keynote you need keynoted), an excellent and prolific writer, and someone who seems to know everybody else in edtech.

As most readers of IHE probably already know, there’s been a little bit of a controversy over the past few days about a “study” purporting to find that the job of university of professor is the least stressful job in America. Scott Jaschik usefully summarizes the original study (by Career Cast), the piece in Forbes that seems to have drawn the most ire, and the various responses—and, of course, his piece has generated even more responses in the form of comments on his article. I’m struck, as always, by the widespread misconceptions about what it is, exactly, that university professors do—even, apparently, among readers of IHE.

“A year ago, I could not have imagined that we would be where we are now,” she said. “Who knows where we’ll be in five more years?” ask Ms. Koller, a representative of Coursera, the most utilized of the MOOC options so far.