“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 …
Category Archives: Higher Ed
“Judge & Justify” Games for the University Classroom
On Monday, October 22, 2018, Anthropology professor Krista Harper and I hosted a gathering of University of Massachusetts Amherst instructors: Game-Based Learning Community of Practice: Make a Game for your Class. The session was built on the premise that games emerging out of the loose heritage of the popular card game Apples to Apples (we chose to label …
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Thoughts on “Making Digital Learning Work”
A new report called “Making Digital Learning Work” (authored by Arizona University and the Boston Consulting Group) summarizes case studies on “digital learning” efforts taking place at Arizona State University, Georgia State University, Houston Community College, the Kentucky Community and Technical College System, Rio Salado Community College, and the University of Central Florida. Higher Ed futurist …
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How Does Media Literacy Backfire? (and What That Question Misses)
danah boyd of Microsoft Research (author of It’s Complicated: the social lives of networked teens), recently gave a talk at the big tech/media/culture conference SXSW called “What Hath We Wrought?” (46 min, 14 min of Q&A) that’s been getting a lot of notice in among scholars of the intersections of media, tech, and education. boyd …
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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 …
Sigh: “Historically black colleges must pay more to issue bonds than institutions of comparable financial strength, study finds.”
From Inside Higher Ed: The Cost of Being an HBCU “The only factor that couldn’t be ruled out was the race associated with the colleges involved, Mayew said. The typical investor for these bonds “is a rich white person,” he noted.” Here’s the journal article itself.
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 …
Visiting with Game Designers in Budapest
I (virtually) visited a Political Ecology and Environmental Justice graduate class in Budapest to help them with their game design projects a few weeks back. I thought it was a great session, and I hope the students got useful feedback from me and my co-panelists. My full write-up and recording of the visit are on my …
“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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