Blogs

In grad school, I openly envied my colleagues in the sciences. It wasn’t the slightly higher stipends or the chance to play with cool toys, as real as both of those were. It was the opportunity to work on a regular basis with a lab group.

Adrian Sannier is one of those edtech leaders who is difficult to pigeonhole. An academic working for a big publishing company. A truth-teller operating within a buttoned-down publisher. An idealist operating within the real world of business, profit and loss. Adrian's title at Pearson is Digital Strategist and Senior Vice President of Product - he is the guy behind OpenClass.

I'm joining the 21st Century, 13 years in.

The evidence that stories are effective and efficient teaching tools is generally based on test results -- improved reading, writing, science and math scores. But in terms of teaching sustainability concepts, stories have an additional advantage. To the extent that they describe real-world (or seemingly real-world, or even imaginably real-world) characters and actions, each story situation is inherently trans-disciplinary.

How being there was in some ways better, some ways worse.

Bloomberg news yesterday ran a story about the University of Phoenix, in which it reported drops in quarterly earnings and share price as a function of a drop in enrollment. The headline reflected net income and enrollment. But the real news was buried in the fifth paragraph.

In Turkey, students are admitted into universities through a nationwide test. After the students take the test and receive their scores, they submit a list of choices of the institutions and programs they want to attend to a nationwide center which places them to one of their choices. This placement is a result of not only the test score of the student but also the relative scores of all other students who made the same choice across the country.

Like many of you, I took the time to print out and carefully read Lev Gonick's essay "The Year Ahead in IT, 2013". The entire essay is worth spending time with, as you will find a number of challenging ideas and insights embedded in Gonick's writing.