Blogs

Ron Adner (a valued colleague at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth- full disclosure) did not set out to write a book about innovation in higher ed. I'm going to do my best to convince him to turn his considerable powers of analysis to our industry for his next book. The lessons of The Wide Lens are however essential for higher ed to grapple with, as we attempt to understand how to effectively innovate our industry to remain relevant and prosperous in the digital age.

Often there is a lot of discussion on protecting the identity of our subjects when we do our research. The IRB focuses on the protection of both the subjects and the institution to a great extent, but what about the researcher? In the Terry Arendell paper about the difficulties she found in her interviews men, the topic of safety in the field is discussed at length. It important to note that while this particular example discussed the dangers of women being alone while interview men, this does not mean that other gender interactions won't lead to dangerous situations.

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum works at four institutes of higher learning at the same time. That's right, four.

TED brings us a tool to create our own video content, launched at the end of April: TED-Ed, “lessons worth sharing.” It seems like TED-Ed has successfully capitalized on an emerging ed tech formula of sorts – facilitating the production of content that is visually interesting, sharable, customizable, specific and engaging.

Educational technology is hot (finally!). Thanks to edX and Udacity and Khan Academy and Coursera and the Stanford AI course our world is getting lots of attention. Lots of people have lots of opinions about the growth of the massively open online course (MOOC), but as with most things a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. David Brooks' column The Campus Tsunami (5/3/12) is a case in point.

A longtime correspondent writes: "Out here in California, cc's are facing a real budget crisis. At my campus, we're trying to cut $5 million out of this year's budget, and this year was not a good year."

About a month ago, I got really lucky. My school sent out an e-mail notifying me that the following week would be “Fulbright Week,” and that they would be offering a series of panels to bring me up to speed and prepare me for the application process. I had been planning for a while to apply for a Fulbright to fund my dissertation research on race and slavery in nineteenth-century Colombia, so I was happy Rice had a whole week devoted to getting prepared. As I started looking into the process more deeply, I had a momentary sense of panic as I realized I should have started months before I did.

It's that time of year (mountains of FYC essays) but I also had to do a blind peer-review for a journal submission. It doesn't go well.