Blogs

In response to yesterday’s post about what college should cost, several people answered by saying something like “just add up what you need to provide a good education and divide by the number of students.” Which sounds reasonable enough, until you reflect on the word “need.”

A crisis in public higher education: coming soon to a university near you – if not already there.

Dean Dad kicked off a great discussion in his column yesterday asking "What Should a Year of College Cost?". His post, and the dialogue that followed, got me thinking about this question from an academic technology perspective.

I guess the first thing I should do is disillusion any preconceptions that my Long Distance mom (Elizabeth Coffman) has built up in her probably much needed blog venting. Contrary to the popular belief of my parents, I actually ended up graduating with honors. Most people were surprised, in fact almost everyone except me.

Writing from a residence hall suite in British Columbia presents a challenge or two to a blogger on a deadline. The Pacific timezone is lovely, but it definitely interferes with sleep cycles and resource curation. Once again, I am bringing you the "Tales From The Tabs" as a means of sharing those items that I am reading as I work my way through the web while on one of my many consulting trips:

Higher education, once a whole division of UNESCO-Paris’ education sector, has gradually shrunk to a small section that, at this writing, comprises but a few people. This is arguably a major setback for an organization such as UNESCO, which provided the venue for international HE milestones such as the 1998 and 2009 World Conferences, and a seminal, richly funded international higher education research partnership with the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. That said, stripping la maison back to the studs, and taking a moderately bullish view of the future, could also reposition UNESCO-Paris for some significant strategic opportunities.

1.) Page 403. O, I so want to be a mother. We're in Nighttown, the late night hallucinogenic bad dreams part of Ulysses. Leopold Bloom, a cuckold, has struggled all day with his sense of his shaky masculinity, and now in this insanely desublimating setting he has been transfigured into a puling, mincing pregnant woman.

I happened to be listening to the second hour of the Dianne Rehm show on NPR this morning. Dianne's guest was Callum Roberts, a marine conservation biologist, oceanographer, author and research scholar at the University of York, England. Roberts was on to promote his book "The Ocean of Life", a discussion of how important oceans are to human survival and what sorts of major stresses oceans are currently undergoing.