23 juin 2013
Remodel or new construction?
By Elizabeth Millard. Many colleges and universities are tempted to revamp buildings because there isn’t enough space to construct new, technology-rich facilities. But sometimes, the amount of renovation required can drive costs so high that it may be less expensive to build something new. That was the situation at Gulf Coast State College (Fla). College president James Kerley explains that an early candidate for a new technology center was a building from the 1960s that was being used as a tech hub. Read more...Campus construction roundup: See stories of budgets behind new buildings
By Melissa Ezarik. Hardhats were not an uncommon sight amid the bustle of activity on college and university campuses this year. But there’s no such thing as a standard journey from building vision to completion. Take a look at funding and budgeting snapshots of seven campus construction projects completed between last summer and this summer. Read more...Euro MOOCs in Global Context
By Kris Olds. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were ‘invented’ in Canada in 2008, and then became transformed, institutionalized and scaled up via the efforts of people, universities, and firms, in the Boston and San Francisco Bay Area city-regions. In the process debates about MOOCs have blossomed, entangled as they are in discussions about online pedagogy through to longer-standing debates about lifelong learning, internationalization, austerity, ‘disruptive innovation,’ public service, deterritorialization, education reform, and many (many) other issues. Read more...6 Limitations of the Nonprofit Education Model
ByJoshua Kim. I love working in the not-for-profit higher education sector. A mission driven institutional orientation aligns well with my values. I take pleasure in the thought that the campus that I work will endure for the decades and hopefully centuries to come, just as it as endured and prospered in the decades and centuries past. The goal of creating social value above profits provides a sense of purpose. The culture of openness, transparency, and sharing within the not-for-profit education sector is the basis for the relationships that I've developed with colleagues at other institutions. We believe that the market is not the only method that should organize and motivate group behavior and individual action, and see our institutions as a countervailing forces to the dominant free-market paradigm. Read more...When Everyone Is a Higher Ed Expert
ByJoshua Kim. Everyone I know seems to know the following about higher ed:A. What Is Wrong
B. How to Fix It
C. Why We Haven't Fixed It Yet
Us higher ed folks are nothing if not confident in our own abilities to evaluate, and if given half a chance, solve the problems facing our industry. I've had so many conversations with experts on higher ed that I've started to doubt my own abilities to either understand what the problems may be, or contribute to any potential solutions. If we can't all be right about the diagnosis of what ails higher ed, and what the best path forward is for a cure, then perhaps none of us are. Read more...
Processing Change and the Importance of Acknowledgment
By Eric Stoller. Change is thrilling. Change is scary. Change is rejuvenating. Change is fast. Change is slow. Change happens. My consulting endeavors take me all over the country and onto campuses of all shapes and sizes. Most of the time, I'm brought in to talk about social media and strategic communications. What generally happens is that social media are the lead-in to a greater conversation about organizational change and organizational communication. Organizations are usually eager to talk about change with an outsider like myself. I stroll onto campus and bring a new voice to the table. A lot of conversations about change consist of an "airing of grievances" or issues that the organization is dealing with. Read more...Trial Run
By Margaret Andrews. They came from Oman, Chile, Lebanon, Hong Kong, Qatar – and the United States. Earlier this week I taught the inaugural 2-day Strategy and Competition in Higher Education professional development program, which is based on the 15-week for-credit class I’ve taught for the last two years. The discussions were fabulous. Read more...Throwing the Books at Each Other
By Barbara Fister. Many residents of Urbana, Illinois are not too happy with their public library director at the moment. Tracy Nectoux of Smile Politely, an online local culture magazine, reported last Thursday that a large percentage of the library’s non-fiction collection was being removed in a hasty and ill-considered project driven by an awkward glitch in planning. Some temporary workers had been hired to insert RFID tags into the books and it seemed foolish not to remove outdated books from the collection first, particularly since the RFID tags had yet to arrive. So to make use of the workers who were already on the clock, that removal project was suddenly shifted into high gear, and soon the whole thing was smoking and the wheels fell off, but not before thousands of books were discarded. Read more...Privacy, Security & Your Data
ByTracy Mitrano. Last night I returned from Italy and a great experience at the AMICAL Conference in Rome. As promised in previous blogs, I will share more about it in subsequent blogs, in particular thoughts about liberal education and MOOCs. In the meantime, tonight there is an interesting live stream event in NYC of which some might want to be aware. Planned prior to the NSA news, and more focused on corporate responsibilities, this event nonetheless will have to at least touch on contemporary issues, highlighting overall the significant role that "privacy" is playing in global culture. Read more...Thinking Context: No More Writing "Workshop"
ByJohn Warner. I think about the language I use with my students a lot.
For example, even in the sentence above, I notice my instinct to use “my” in conjunction with “students,” connoting a kind of ownership.
Or is it responsibility?
Is this a good thing, turning these people on the class roll into my students? Doesn’t it suggest that they may not have identities outside of their relationship to my course?
Sometimes in class I will call them “kids,” though this does not sit well with me and I try to correct myself. Read more...
