Via the shadowy arcana of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, I was served up a video from an account named “Adam Emond”. Emond operated in the same vein as many Youtubers producing works in the “Every other beat is missing” meme (which may be well over a decade old) detailed in this Daily Dot article. Here is …
Category Archives: Change
“Buy-in as Infrastructure”
“How often do you get to gather a group of faculty and other academic stakeholders from across your institution in one room and have them talk to each other about how they teach and what they need to serve their students well?” From Michael Feldstein’s Toward Operational Excellence at Student Success: California Community Colleges Let’s assume …
Domains 2017
In an attempt to give an exhaustive account of my experiences at Domains 2017 (June 5-6, 2017), I fear I have very early exhausted myself. The conference was such a remarkable and singular experience for me that I felt the need to honor it with as thorough a documentation and compilation as I could. That effort …
Pew Report on “The Future of Free Speech, Trolls, Anonymity and Fake News Online”
I spent my lunch reading over this report (“The Future of Free Speech, Trolls, Anonymity and Fake News Online” compiled by the Pew Research Center) and have skimmed through the rest. The summary is probably a 10-15 minute read, and the major findings of the report (the first page) is probably more of a 45 …
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Video: Deep Work with Cal Newport
I recently finished Deep Work (2016) by Cal Newport, a writer and computer science professor at Georgetown. I read a lot of “productivity lit,” and while Deep Work definitely falls into that category, it offers a lot of practical framing for how individuals and organizations can structure their work environments to help produce better, more meaningful …
“Collaborative Overload”: Professional Team Performance Through a Management Lens
From the Jan/Feb 2016 Harvard Business Review: Collaborative Overload. Emphasis mine: “Research we’ve done across more than 300 organizations shows that the distribution of collaborative work is often extremely lopsided. In most cases, 20% to 35% of value-added collaborations come from only 3% to 5% of employees…As a recent study led by Ning Li, of …
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“Do Black Students Benefit as Grad Rates Increase?” (Often: No)
From the new report: Rising Tide II: Do Black Students Benefit as Grad Rates Increase? Emphasis mine: “[Andrew Nichols]: Our data show that almost 70 percent of the schools we studied increased graduation rates for black students from 2003-2013. However, those gains lagged behind those of white students, so more than half of institutions (53 percent) …
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Where do faculty leave the innovation-decision process?
A rich-for-mining research article that could inform any strategy for instructional innovation (while this is focused on physics, there’s a lot to draw from for any discipline): “Use of research-based instructional strategies in introductory physics: Where do faculty leave the innovation-decision process?” (2012) DOI:10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.8.020104 I recommend at least skimming through to the Discussion and Conclusions …
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The main unit of instructional change in higher ed? The academic department.
A lot to chew on with this article! Here’s a few choice quotes: “Instead of steady-state interactions, a change agent may encourage the development of new ideas (emergent change) by connecting faculty members that do not usually interact and thus may have diverse perspectives…” “Because of these periphery nodes, this department may require prolonged support before …
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