Blogs

The Boy had his first major band concert this week. It was held in the high school gym, where the acoustics are every bit as good as you’d expect in a high school gym. In our district, fifth grade is the first year for school music lessons and band, so the band sounded a little rough around the edges, but that’s okay.

One of the concepts I teach in my Quantitative Reasoning class is the idea of “Exponential Growth.” Such growth, where a variable grows by a fixed percent, is found in such things as population growth and the growth of money earning interest. I found myself thinking of this recently as I watch my daughter grow at a rate that seems to be exponential, outgrowing clothes almost before they can be worn and threatening to soon pass me by in terms of height. I am thrilled to see her turning into a healthy young lady, but I have to pause as I realize that, as she grows, she is exposed to aspects of life that I would prefer to shield her from.

At a recent International Studies Association panel presentation about military mergers, I was asked how I got access to the ex-combatants-turned soldiers in Mindanao with whom I did a focus group discussion. I am often asked this type of question by foreign audiences, and my standard answer is: I have built a considerable personal network within the armed forces and have a decade of field experience in my belt; I know who to call or send text messages to. By comparison, I never get asked this sort of methodological questions by Philippine audiences, not for lack of critical spine, but because field exposure is considered de rigueur in any Social Science research project.

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.