The challenge of change: advice from Keynes
Harvey P. Weingarten, Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, 2016/08/25
It is inevitable, I think, that proponents of 'quality' in education will call for an end to the mandate to provide access to all, instead focusing on 'higher quality' for a few. More...

Ruling Pushes Door to Grad-Student Unions ‘Wide Open’
Peter Schmidt, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2016/08/25
While a graduate student association president I spent two years working to unionize graduate teaching assistants. The effort was ultimately unsuccessful. Not because of law - unionization is much easier in Canada and contributes greatly to our more equitable society. More...

A Domain of One's Own in a Post-Ownership Society
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2016/08/25
This article describes what is in retrospect a remarkable turn of events: in the digital world, private enterprise has realized the Marxist ideal, the elimination of private property. More...

We Were Mostly Wrong: Looking back at 25 years on the web
Martin Veitch, IDG Connect, 2016/08/25
My father was what they call a telephone pioneer and I guess I'm an internet pioneer. I wrote my first computer program in 1979 and was working for Texas Instruments by 1980. By 1991 I was studying for a PhD I would never get, playing in an internet multi-user dungeon (MUD), teaching critical thinking by telephone for Athabasca University, and playing with a thing called the Maximus BBS. More...

How Twitter Got Angry
Kevin Marks, Fast Company, 2016/08/25

This is a surprisingly insightful article on the dynamics of Twitter abuse (surprising because the title and lede are so very very bad). More...

Noam Chomsky Defines What It Means to Be a Truly Educated Person
Dan Colman, Open Culture, 2016/08/24
"Humboldt," Chomsky says, "argued, I think, very plausibly, that the core principle and requirement of a fulfilled human being is the ability to inquire and create constructively, independently, without external controls." That sounds about right to me, and is certainly the sort of education I aspire to. More...