By Oronte. Eudora Welty says, “Place is one of the lesser angels that watch over the racing hand of fiction,” though she quickly adds that “place can be seen…to have a great deal to do with…goodness, if not to be responsible for it. […] The truth is, fiction depends for its life on place. Location is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of ‘What happened? Who’s here? Who’s coming?’—and that is the heart’s field.”
As I mentioned in my last post, we’ve been talking a lot in workshop about representations of place. We live down the road from a famous city that invites notice, that wants to be discussed and remembered, in a region that prides itself on easily-named features and whose people are often distinctive. I don’t know why a writer wouldn’t make an attempt, eventually, at a story set here. Read more...
The Governance Challenge for Ibero-American Universities
By Jamil Salmi. A 2013 report published in the United Kingdom proposed the image of “an avalanche” to describe the radical changes affecting tertiary education in many parts of the world (Barber, M., Donnelly, K., and S. Rizvi, 2013). Indeed, a growing number of rupture factors are at play in transforming the ecosystem in which tertiary education institutions are operating, drastically influencing how they perform their teaching and research functions. Among these rupture factors are technological innovations such as flipped classrooms for interactive learning, mass online open courses (MOOCS) reaching hundred of thousands of students all over the world, new forms of competition from for-profit and corporate universities that provide professional qualifications closely linked to labor market needs, and new accountability modalities like the global rankings, which allow to measure and compare the performance of universities across all continents. Read more...
Place in Fiction, Part 1
Reversing the Odds
By Chris Dellarocas and Romy Ruukel. In the coming disruption of the higher education ecosystem, the odds are not in favor of traditional Universities. As management guru Clayton Christensen argues in his celebrated book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, incumbent organizations often fail to adapt to innovations due to their entrenched culture and more traditional client base: this is why Kodak lost the digital photography market and newspaper circulation was wiped out by the Internet. Read more...
Doing More Outside the Academy
By Amy Brand. A report issued recently by the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled Attitudes on Innovation: How College Leaders and Faculty See the Key Issues Facing Higher Education highlights the frustration felt by college leaders and faculty alike when it comes to strategic innovation at universities.
Both groups want faster change, along with greater faculty involvement in whatever technological disruption is actually occurring on their campuses. Read more...
Did I Hear President Obama Utter the Word “Patent?”
By Tracy Mitrano. I don’t think I have ever heard a term of intellectual property in a State of the Union speech before! How exciting! And why? May I recommend Jaffe and Lerner’s book, “Innovation and Its Discontents” for an early, solid treatment of the problems in this area that journalists on occasion have followed up on. (See link, for example.)
Why would the President raise this issue to high level of a State of Union address? I assume because it has become clear to just about everyone, major corporations not least, that the system as revised in the early 1990’s is so flawed as to be serving almost no one except the filing attorneys in the favored state of Texas. In short, there is a growing consensus that innovation is suffering for the failure to address the unintended consequences of the most recent round of legislative patent revisions. Read more...
The Internet, the Pope and the iPod Revisited
By Tracy Mitrano. In 2005, after teaching a weeklong course on Internet Law and the MiNE Program at Universita Cattolica del Sacre Cuore in Piacenza, Italy, I wrote an article entitled "The Internet, The Pope and The iPod."
Reading about Pope Francis’s remarks to the illuminati assembled at Davos reminded me of that otherwise long ago forgotten piece. Read more...
It's Impossible to Teach What I Want My Students to Learn
By John Warner. The longer I do this college instructing stuff, the more convinced I become that it’s impossible to teach what I most want my students to learn. What’s more, it’s probably also impossible to measure whether or not they’ve learned what I want them to learn, and definitely not possible within the timeline of a single semester. Part of my problem is that I have a difficult time even articulating what I most want them to learn. Read more...
Clay Shirky Comes Not to Praise Education, but to Bury It
By John Warner. Clay Shirky is so concerned about the state of higher education that he can’t help but want to destroy it. In a recent blog post, he argues that we are in the midst of a new (or not so new) “reality.” This reality, to Shirky’s figuring, is the end of higher education’s “Golden Age.” The solution – which is no real surprise coming from someone who has made his living as an Internet futurist – is to embrace our digitally mediated future. Read more...
(Don't) follow the money
By G. Rendell. I recently started reading Nature's Trust, by Mary Christina Wood. It had been recommended as a possible text for an introductory course in sustainability. I like the book, I can see why it was recommended, but as a text it really presumes a range of knowledge well beyond what I expect of first-year students. Thus, I think I'll stick with Jared Diamond's Collapse, which makes a lot of the same fundamental points while being more immediately accessible. Read more...
Travel and Separation
By Susan O'Doherty. Last week, Bill, Ben and I left our hotel in Shanghai at 5:30 AM China time (13 hours ahead of Eastern US time). Our second plane landed at JFK at around 2PM, half an hour late.. The second flight, from Beijng to New York, was difficult — the seats were cramped, even for a smallish person like me. Bill and Ben, on either side of me, were eating their knees, and of course spilled over into my space. When the passengers in front of us reclined, our tray tables were forced into my chest/their midsections. I am usually a good plane sleeper, but sleep wasn't an option on this trip. Read more...
