As each year passes, it becomes harder to remember what exactly life was like before the internet.  How did we communicate?  How did we store and retrieve information?  (A colleague recently commented on twitter that watching All the President’s Men today feels like an ad for Google because the first hour or so is just people looking through phone books). More...

One of the biggest challenges we have as a country is keeping adults skilled.  Adults are far more expensive to train than young people because their labour has significant market value – it costs them money to take time off work, and their free time is limited due to things such as child or elder care.  So, if you are going to entice them into some form of education, the program you’re pushing needs above all to be i) short and ii) have labour market value. More...

Last month the British Council and NAFSA published an interesting pair of studies, which I had the good fortune to be involved with.  Three colleagues – Janet Ilieva, Vangelis Tsigirlis and Pat Killingley – wrote the main report (which, among other things, focussed on differences within Europe) and I contributed a companion report on the Americas. More...