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Highlights from the Apple Summit

The Summit was amazing. Very very cool. Here are my two favoriteĀ  moments:

  1. Alan Kay telling us that, essentially, our work is just “pushing bits around” which isn’t leading to any sort of deeper understanding of anything–basically a form of “distracting ourselves to death.” I believe he said we’re “looking for the keys under a streetlamp”–doing what’s easy, not what’s right.
  2. I called Adrian Sannier (see my earlier post about him) an ignorant slut in the Q & A to his presentation. I was, of course, joking. Which I think he and most people understood. Not everyone, I learned later.

Thank God the economy’s so stable

so we in higher ed don’t have to worry about folks questioning the value of a college degree, particularly when we have “open teaching,” where faculty use web tools to open course enrollment to non-matriculated students and hand out certificates of completion in lieu of official transcripts. Thank God the market’s doing well so we don’t have to worry about this newfangled world where content is free, knowledge is open, access is expected, and we get to be all creative when we’re not playing halo and shopping at Costco. What’s that about the economy? Uh oh. Time to … Continue Reading

Monday, Monday, it was all I hoped it would be

Ah, another satisfying day at work. Here is what I accomplished today:

  • sent updates to the President’s Cabinet (sorry about the 7-hour internet outage, sorry it took 90 minutes to send a campus-wide email to 4500 people, and glad you like the new “web for employees” self service tool)
  • sent out the agenda for the directors’ meeting tomorrow: it will be The One About The Password Synchronization
  • determined that my personal pet project of a bunch of Dell minis to dish out like jujubes to buy faculty love will be delayed due to Dell’s 30-day delivery backlog
  • attended a faculty meeting to … Continue Reading

Tuition Bubble?

The Center for College Affordability and Productivity issued an interesting report asking if the higher education market shared similarities with the housing market. See “A Tuition Bubble?” An excerpt:

“Most government subsidies lead to lower prices for consumers, but this study claims that this is not the case for higher education. The ultimate reason is that the nature of the subsidies and the peculiar characteristics of the market for higher education encourage schools to raise their prices when the studentsā€™ ability to pay increases.”

There are some useful graphs reflect student debt and tuition increases and a nice snarky remark … Continue Reading

What he said

This presentation by Adrian Sannier (UTO at ASU) will cost you about 72 minutes of your life. But it’s worth it if you’re interested in what the future holds for us IT’ers in higher ed. I’m considering showing it to all the IT staff at our next staff meeting and to the dreaded advisory group too. I think Sannier’s right on the money with where we should be going and what we should be doing. The question is: how much do we let our culture and internal politics affect these ideas, our plans, and doing … Continue Reading

Our Little Library

So last week I talked about organizational operations: culture, strategy, tactics. Good luck with that! Now, it’s a collection of some of the articles which, in toto, suggest that, well, life in higher ed might get a lot more opportunity-ful in the future. Time for your strategery! Here are the articles referenced earlier: