Learning Innovation

We learn in Kevin Kiley's 9/14/12 article "Bigger Picture, Smaller Numbers" that Saint Benedict’s president, MaryAnn Baenninger, has pursued a diminished enrollment / higher tuition / lower discount strategy rate to bring expenses in line with income.

Is it possible that I've become too enamored with Jim O'Neill's BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) concept? This summer I gave O'Neil's book, The Growth Map: Economic Opportunity in the BRICs and Beyond, a glowing review. Sharma's Breakout Nations has caused me to re-think, or at least question, some of my BRIC enthusiasm.

Did you read Andrew Rice's terrific article in the NYT's this Tuesday, Anatomy of a Campus Coup, about the failed attempt to ouster president Sullivan from the University of Virginia? This well-reported article places the nasty fight between UVa's board and what ended up being UVA's academic community (in which Sullivan is well respected) within the context of the larger economic pressures facing higher ed.

Did you take 117 minutes out of your day to watch the latest Apple product announcement event?

Instructure has responded to the unplanned downtime of its cloud based Canvas LMS on 8/20/12 with a client/public facing communications plan.

Have I told you how much I love audiobooks? Have I mentioned how much I enjoy the instant purchasing, lower prices, and multi-platform flexibility of Kindle e-books? Have we talked about our concerns about the ever widening gap between the curriculum and consumer content experience? Well, things have just gotten better. And things have just gotten worse.

I've been racking my brain trying to come up with a way to discuss these three books with you. The deal is that we meet in this space to discuss the intersection of education and technology. Where does fiction fit in?

I get it. I really do. Amazon is not interested in adding education to the verticals that it wants to reinvent.