Blogs

It is a truth universally acknowledged that where there's a hacker up for mischief, there are security settings just waiting to be breached. I have a begrudging respect for mischievous hackers: wherever the rest of us have been blithely accepting of whatever security protocols we don't read about in Terms of Service, they have figured out exactly how to exploit that for their own purposes.

I study the workings of organizations whose main purpose is not just to earn money, but to do something else. Just what that “something else” is has not completely been determined, and so the “objective function” of the nonprofit organization remains a “holy grail” for my sub-sub field that many continue to search for. I must admit that I am among those searching for this elusive model.

China now enrols more than 260,000 international students, and has set ambitious targets to double that over the coming years. Malaysia now has more than 60,000 international students enrolled, both from within the region, and beyond. Singapore, with a population about the same as Sydney, now has around 90,000 international students. Now Taiwan is seeking to enrol thousands of international students, and is mainly targeting the South East Asian market. Its Minister has announced that Taiwan’s higher education system has key features that should be used as a basis to attract international students.

We recently discovered some old photos of our daughter's first Halloween. At 18 months, covered by a red hooded cape, she walked from house to house in the pitch black night, collecting candy in a wicker basket. She marched away from us as we stood on the sidewalk, confident on stout, stockinged legs. We later learned that on that same day a 25-year old graduate of our university, Teresa Halbach, drove alone to an Auto Salvage yard to photograph cars, where she was taken captive, horribly raped and murdered.

Teaching, consulting and blogging about strategy and competition in higher education means that there is an endless supply of reading material, themes to explore, people with strong opinions . . . and innovative ideas.

Yesterday I received two emails in rapid succession that fairly begged for a single response. One of them seemed quite confident in asserting that developmental education is a cash cow for community colleges. The other seemed equally confident that developmental education is a money drain for community colleges.

I am one of those higher ed administrators who started my career in teaching. Relatively quickly I moved from a full-time faculty gig to the start-up life, and then into educational technology.

There have been several news items this week about textbooks -- not surprising since we're well into the back-to-school season. And despite all the hype and promise for innovation that digital content was meant to bring about, the news is pretty ordinary: it's mostly about cost savings. As such, are we being limited by our preconceived notions of what textbooks are meant to be?