Blogs

Education technology startups abound. Established education technology entities are, well, established. The sphere is literally buzzing with activity. Our institutions require tremendous amounts of technology to support students, staff, and faculty. Whenever I chat with fellow Student Affairs practitioners, it seems that we all have a shared experience of working with companies that provide us with various technologies. However, as I ponder this relationship, I started thinking about what it would look like if technology companies provided monies for internships for full-time practitioners. Internships that would benefit both the companies and practitioners, with the end result being greater levels of student satisfaction, usability, retention, and data.

A new crowdfunding site, Unglue.it launches today. It hopes to raise money for e-books, not to have them written but so that the funding goes towards paying authors or publishers for existing works, giving them a one-time licensing fee in exchange for their releasing their e-books for free, under a Creative Commons license and without DRM.

As noted by The Atlantic, the group behind the TED conferences -- of which I'm generally a big fan -- has decided not to post video of a recent invited talk by Nick Hanauer. Hanauer is a businessman -- a multi-millionaire, courtesy of a long entrepreneurial career and an early investment in Amazon. He's also a realist and one of those Warren Buffett-like folks who think the middle class is getting a raw deal.

I return to the scene of some of my greatest happiness, and my most bitter disappointments, my former employer, Clemson University.

This is an interesting time for international consortia of universities. The consortia structure brings with it strengths and weaknesses. For example, it is large enough to enable the drawing in of complementary resources, people, skill sets, networks, etc. The scale of these consortia and the emphasis on peer-based membership structures also facilitates collaborative action on a number of levels. However, international consortia are also too large, in some ways, to facilitate rapid responses to opportunities.

Monroe Community College, in Henrietta, New York, (near Rochester) has started setting institution-wide goals with 100 day timelines. The first goal it has set is reducing the number of passwords a student needs to sign on to various parts of the registration system.

Tom Friedman had an interesting quote in a recent NYT opinion piece: “Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary.” And so begins the third post in the series on “Foundations of Strategy.”

In an environment where the celebrity academic is gaining more prominence, how do we evaluate what we're worth and make sure we're not giving it away?