Blogs

We do, because of the Internet and its intersection with business, law and people. All one has to do is...

A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to discuss a proposed and relatively dramatic policy change with someone fairly high in state government. I objected to the change with some vigor, and outlined several objections that I thought added up to a compelling case. She listened politely, and then gave an answer for which I hadn’t prepared.

It's fairly clear that Silicon Valley has decided that education is a space ripe for "disruption." But there's a lot of talk that "suddenly" technology and education are coming together. This is a grossly a-historical way to think about ed-tech, one that ignores years of research, development, successes and failures.

Last November, I briefly visited Boston to give a lecture at Northeastern University, my alma mater where I got my Ph.D. degree. The last time I was there was four and a half years ago to defend my dissertation. It felt like “Homecoming” for me this time, when I visited my old university after such a long time.

There is no doubt that online education has arrived in Higher Education. Each year, the numbers of colleges and universities offering online courses increases. There is certainly appeal for these types of courses: students can better fit them into busy schedules and traveling to campus is no longer required. While I dabbled in teaching hybrid and online courses for a while, I have been teaching online for most of the past two years. Additionally, I began my graduate career in a hybrid PhD program: two weeks of face-to-face instruction with the rest of the instruction and work provided entirely online, and mostly asynchronously. Having been on both sides of online learning has taught me a few lessons about how best to help students learn in an environment that provides as many challenges (if not more) as face-to-face teaching.

Social media has been present in the lives of collegiate athletes for as long as there has been social media. However, it would seem that coaches and the NCAA are just now realizing that social media is something that they may want to learn more about.

We are suffering under an acute shortage of technologically literate smart fiction. The Fear Index should be read up by everyone who works in and around computing.

Chile’s Ministry of Education has launched a web portal offering with unprecedented detail employment and earnings data to prospective applicants to higher education. The portal, called “Mi futuro” is a searchable database that lists hundreds of degree programs, professional and technical, from Medicine to Auto Mechanic, displaying for each program of every institution of higher education in the country the following information: drop-out rate, average time to degree, average earnings of the graduates after 4 years of graduation, current tuition fees for the program, and accreditation status of the program.