Blogs

What if college got cheaper as you went along?

Ten years ago, Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper published a nifty book about how and why people use paper in their workplaces. The Myth of the Paperless Office reported ethnographic observations of people struggling to do things with computers that they were used to doing on paper; sometimes there were good reasons why paper was so persistent. The title reminded us that the “paperless office” we were promised decades ago is a joke - on us. We use more paper than ever and manage to have disorderly desktops both literally and digitally. That's a funny kind of progress.

Often when writing blog posts or papers, I end up dissecting not just a policy or educational issue but also the specific terms in which it is being described and discussed. I start to pick apart the terms and limits of the discussion alongside my engagement with the argument. Far from being a quirky habit, this kind of attention to language is a key element of much of the work I do.

I just don't think that hierarchy works in organizations that live at the intersection of education and technology.

Yesterday marked the deadline for the first round of submissions for the 2011 DML Competition. This year's topic: designing badges for lifelong learning. How will these badges, part of Mozilla's Open Badges Project, affect higher ed?

This week I will attend my 14th annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) in Charlotte, NC. Each year I learn about which research topics are of interest to this community of scholars and try to gain a sense of which issues have the most potential to change the way we conceive problems or the way higher education professionals practice.

I have a close, longtime friend who has lived the mixed blessing of getting what she has wanted, when she has wanted it. Luckily for her, she generally has good taste, but she has boxed herself into corners a few times when circumstances refused to conspire to save her from herself. I’m thinking that the last couple of years are conspiring to save for-profit higher ed from itself.

The good news is that at several public universities in Brazil, students are being allowed space in the curriculum to add classes of their own choosing to the pre-defined program of study. Okay, most of these choices must be made within their area of study. But there is also an allowance to choose a certain number of credits from any degree program offered at the university. That’s where the good news ends