Blogs

Does your student affairs / higher education graduate program have a technology class? Have you ever hoped for a student affairs technology book? Maybe it's time to look at something outside of our usual wheelhouse. What am I talking about? Well, last October, I tweeted out a question about whether or not we should look at creating a Student Affairs Technology MOOC.

This January, my University hosted a group of Monash University students from Malaysia on nine-day, non-credit study tour. Eighteen months of logistical preparation, including securing permission from University authorities, preparing University facilities and recruiting student guides, preceded this visit. While we are not strangers to international exchanges, this marks the first time we are doing institutional hosting of this scale.

A few years ago many were predicting the demise of the onsite sales call. Why should a sales team get on an airplane when Web conferencing was available?

Another morning all home together. As I begin this blog, it’s a holiday here in BC, the very first celebration of the newly created Family Day. With this holiday, plus two professional development days for teachers, the short month of February is a very short month indeed for school children. For many families the extra days off mean scrambles for childcare and fewer hours for those who depend on the time their children are in school to get work done.

As higher education’s business model implodes, its connection to ethics is revealed.

This semester I find myself engaged in a television serial for the first time in a long time, and I think it’s no accident that it’s the same semester that I’m teaching Victorian literature again for the first time in a long time. The pleasures of the serial are well established, and the Victorian novel originated many of them: the multi-strand narrative with many characters, intertwining narratives of class mobility and courtship, love, death, and striving.

I need some help from my wise and worldly readers on this one. A longtime reader writes: Do you know of any data, reporting, etc, on the information-seeking habits of transfer students when looking at four-year colleges? I would make a guess that some things are the same, but if there are differences, then we should be taking them into account.

Are we paying close enough attention to the lessons we can learn from our colleagues in for-profit higher education? Will the for-profits invest the resources and maintain the long-term focus necessary to develop educational platforms and post-secondary services that elevate them into the elite tier of higher education?