Blogs

Prior to this president’s week, I had never been in Las Vegas but now based on the experience, I should have gone sooner and more often. And I think my family feels the same way.

Yesterday Ben told me a funny story about one of his professors. "He sounds like a lot of fun," I commented.

At this juncture I would like to say a few words about MOOCs. First, let’s level set: MOOC is an acronym for Massive Open Online Classroom. While distance education is as old at least as correspondence courses, MOOCs are distinguishable as using Internet technologies to bring free education to students globally. The erstwhile Stanford professor – erstwhile because his “experiment” created such an uproar and opportunity that he has since left Stanford to found his own MOOC company, Udacity, -- who spearheaded this term set off a tipping point for a generation of efforts in what is otherwise known as “distance” or “distributed” education.

Hype over research carries important risks to trust, public decision making—and funding. Overpromising is unethical and imprudent.

When people ask me what keeps me awake at night, they probably expect me to respond with issues related to college affordability or access. And those problems do prey on my mind every day. However, what really keeps me awake (quite literally) is the feeling that Americans no longer realize the value of education in general and higher education more specifically.

Bruce Leslie, the Chancellor of Alamo Colleges, has a provocative piece on the Huffington Post in which he foretells the end of community colleges. While it’s easy to argue with this particular or that one, the point that resonates is that we need to move beyond the “mini-university” model.

A couple of fairly dorky words seem to be getting a lot of play lately: “curation” and “discovery.” Both of these are words that are familiar to librarians, a part of our professional toolkit, but they are being used increasingly in non-library settings.

Another German high-official was recently in the middle of a discussion about a supposedly problematic Ph.D. thesis. After the popular politician and defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the Education minister, Annette Schavan was accused of using other people’s works for her doctorate completed in 1980. Ironically enough, Schavan, a close collaborator of German chancellor Angela Merkel, had among other responsibilities, the duty to oversee the activity of universities, including those in relation to the awarding of doctoral degrees.