Learning Innovation

Matthew Yglesias has zero to say about higher ed and the price of tuition in his excellent Kindle Single The Rent is Too Damn High. This oversight (doesn't everyone relate everything to higher ed?) should not stop us generalizing some of Yglesias' conclusions to our world.

It is not possible to overstate the degree to which Doonesbury defines the cultural milieux from which so many of us in higher education and associated knowledge industries are drawn from. How many of you have Doonesbury cartoons taped up to your office door? Raise your hand if Doonesbury is the first thing you look for in your morning paper.

We can debate Brian Kibby's vision that higher ed should go completely digital in 36 months. Many of us have already commented on his essay "Digital Deadline", and I'm sure that you will have some strong opinions as well when you go back and read his piece and the subsequent discussion.

I am one of those higher ed administrators who started my career in teaching. Relatively quickly I moved from a full-time faculty gig to the start-up life, and then into educational technology.

Willpower deserves a much bigger cultural footprint than it has so far enjoyed. Some books end up making appearances in all sorts of conversations, spoken about by a diverse range of smart colleagues and friends. Willpower was not one of those books. It deserves to be.

A Q&A about how one college prevents A/V failures.

What can we learn in higher ed from the new TEDBooks initiative? I have no idea, but I do have some questions:

Probably the closest that I'll get to being invited to give a TED Talk is Chris Anderson tweeting about something that I wrote. Last week, in response to my critique that $14.99 is too expensive for a 6 book / 3 month TED book subscription (through TED's new iOS app), Chris tweeted from @TEDchris, "Is $15 too much for 22 short, multimedia enabled books?! http://bit.ly/NNXitg http://bit.ly/Njqo1c"