By Joshua Kim. How many of you have actually spent quality time in an adaptive learning platform?
Not me ... and I’m getting worried about this gap in my experience.
(Although Phil Hill’s post Differentiated, Personalized & Adaptive Learning: some clarity for EDUCAUSE was very helpful. Thanks Phil. Now everyone go visit MindWires).
My strong sense is that the next few years in edtech will be dominated by two inter-related trends. Read more...

By Joshua Kim. The real question is what you think about the relationship between consumer technology and higher ed?
Is higher ed competing with Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. etc.?
What does that question even mean? What exactly are we competing for? Attention? Relevancy? Eyeballs? Dollars? 
This is the framework that we should take into thinking about what Amazon’s Whispersync technology means for higher ed. Read more...

By Barbara Fister. I am a book person. I read a lot of them. I own a lot of them, and give a lot of them away  I really like being in the stacks of my library, even though sometimes what I’m doing there is deciding which books shouldn't be there. I am a book person who is dismayed that it’s getting harder to share scholarship through the medium of books. It’s not that we aren’t publishing enough books, it’s that we still – stupidly – demand books as a token of productivity exchangeable for the chance at a regular living wage even as the traditional infrastructure for making books public is crumbling. Read more...

By John Lombardi. The ongoing pursuit of the cheapest and least intrusive higher education alternatives continues apace. Some find the activity new and exciting, although of course we’ve always been able to get educated by reading books and studying on our own.  The new twist is that we can now sign up for computer mediated reading and studying on our own, a convenience in the fast-food tradition of highly efficient standardized production of useful commodity products. To guarantee the benefit of this form of higher education, we develop a battery of tests that ensure no student is left behind in the race to certification as an educated and competent adult. Many in the state-supported higher education policy realm see these tests as mechanisms to reduce the number of students in real universities and drive them through a fast food education that produces certification at a low cost, perhaps only $10K or less for a college diploma. Read more...

By Susan O'Doherty. Two friends have recently brought my attention to these articles, which explore some of the ways race and socioeconomic status can affect our experiences and thus our worldview. One could make a convincing argument that the "privilege" of receiving light penalties for serious mistakes is anything but a character builder. Kids whose parents bail them out of every scrape tend to become self-centered, irresponsible adults without a strong grasp of cause and effect. One could even speculate that some of the ignorant white teenagers in the first article might benefit from firsthand experience of the consequences of shopping, driving or walking while black, if only to sensitize them to all the behavior they, as members of a privileged class, routinely get away with. Read more...