By Joshua Kim. Today is the first day of my new gig as the Director of Digital Learning Initiatives at our Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL). 
Over the next weeks and months I’ll be sharing with you what I am learning in this new role, and of course asking for your advice and counsel. Read more...

By Qiang Zha. China appears to be gaining in the global brain race during the past decade. Following the well-known “Thousand Talent Program”, the Chinese government recently launched a “Ten Thousand Talent Program,” that, unlike the former, focuses on home-grown talent and pledges to support 10,000 leading scholars in sciences, engineering and social sciences during the next 10 years, pushing the top 100 to aim for Nobel prizes. There are notable two things here. First, China has begun to focus on leading innovation. Second, the focus has shifted towards cultivating domestic talent. Read more...

By Barbara Fister. Last week I was thinking about how librarians think of knowledge as a collection of things and faculty in the disciplines think about it as a conversation among people. This morning I realized, thinking about the Georgia State University e-reserves lawsuit and the ways nations are negotiating the limits and latitudes of fair use in the classroom, that publishers, like librarians, tend to think of scholarship in terms of things. Librarians do it because we have had to take care of things and provide access to them. Publishers do it because the sale of things (or the licensing of things) is how they pay their bills and, in some cases, make their profits. Read more...

By John Warner. How does this school sound?
    “The mission of __________School is to develop intellectually capable young people the creative minds, healthy bodies, and ethical spirits needed to contribute wisdom, compassion, and leadership to a global society. We provide a rigorous and dynamic academic program through which effective educators lead students to take responsibility for learning.

    We are committed to sustaining a school in which individuals representing diverse cultures and experiences instruct one another in the meaning and value of community and in the joy and importance of lifelong learning.” Read more...

By Margaret Andrews. For the Strategic Management course I co-teach, we chose one industry and gave each student team an organization within this industry to study from a strategic point of view.  The industry was higher education and the organizations were the University of Michigan, Arizona State University, Southern New Hampshire University, and Western Governors University.  Each school had two student teams studying it. Read more...

By G. Rendell. What follows is a bit fragmented, because my thinking here isn't yet fully integrated. Still, due to events in (and insufficiently in) the news, the subject seems timely.
The subject?  Low wages for workers, and the impacts they have on all of us.
The events?  Recent worker protests against Walmart, upcoming worker protests against McDonalds, and ongoing protests against garment manufacturers in Bangladesh. Read more...