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Botswana has accepted tertiary education as a critical driver in creating an “educated and informed nation” for economic diversification and global competitiveness. The government has made a strategic choice to replace diamonds and minerals with human skills as a more reliable and sustainable economic and social development strategy.

My last post was severe in its critical intensity. I poked around…posited and provoked. Innovation is such a buzzword these days. Getting a blogger to write about innovation is as easy as getting me to drink coffee. For this post, I wanted to be more generative than critical. While I've never defined "radical student affairs" on this blog…nor will I ever define it concretely (peaceful acceptance of ambiguity is fairly radical, right?), I realize that pushing and provoking requires ideas. Innovation requires ideation and something to chew on…to mull over. In that spirit, and in no particular order, here are some thoughts on how Student Affairs can become more innovative as a profession:

Ideally, I suppose, I should headline this post "5 Things I've Learned from MOOCs." That's likely what a course -- massive or online or open or not -- is supposed to have a student tout: what I learned. If I were being really forthright with my readers, I would headline this story "5 Things I've Learned from MOOCs as a Serial MOOC Dropout." That's certainly a warning that when I speak about my recent experiences with MOOCs, it's as a lurker and a dropout. But here are five things I definitely recognize that matter to me in terms of my success and completion in these courses.

As I shuffled through the morning paper today, supping a much needed cup of coffee, I came across a story about the innovative architect Thom Mayne (of Morphosis) being selected to design the first building of Cornell University’s Applied Sciences NYC campus. This unique development initiative, outlined in detail here ('Unsettling the university-territory relationship via Applied Sciences NYC'), is rolling forward with considerable speed.

I sat on a pedagogy round-table at the International Studies Association in March, and one of the speakers referred to the high cost of emotional labor for the Women's Studies instructor. Many heads nodded around the room.

If you haven’t seen this article yet, go read it. I’d advise skipping some of the comments -- they’re about as enlightening as internet comments on polarizing issues tend to be – but the story itself is really disturbing. It’s about a study recently released showing tens of thousands of Ph.D.’s across the country, and hundreds of thousands of people with master’s degrees, who are on food stamps.

The "value" of the research I do.

Quiet will definitely be included in my list for the top nonfiction books of 2012. This is strong praise indeed, given that we are barely in May. The book is that good that I find it inconceivable that 10 other better nonfiction books will be published this year.