Designing Education for Learning
Injecting Knowledge or Foolishness? Education strives to prepare learners to meet the social, scientific and technical demands of a changing world, yet does so in a manner that seems antithetical to...
View ArticleStorytelling, Sense-making, and Systems Thinking
Making sense of life through storytelling I teach a class on systems thinking perspectives on public health. This past week we discussed the role of narratives and storytelling as ways to learn about...
View ArticleThinking Different Requires Different Thinking
Think Different Novelty, innovation and doing things differently are seen as the key to competitive advantage and scientific discovery. How we think is as important as what we do and use of the term...
View Article(Un)Building a Mystery: Peeking Behind the Curtain in the Academic Land of Oz
Mystery by UK Tara The gap between what academics do and what those outside of the academy think they do is enormous. The mysteriousness and elite status that universities enjoy may actually serve to...
View ArticleReflecting on Gratitude and Going Beyond Thanksgiving
Today is the day that Americans come together to celebrate Thanksgiving, a day dedicated to gratitude (in Canada, we celebrate Thanksgiving in October, to traditionally align with the harvest). What a...
View ArticleRationalized Education and The Futures of the University
Hallowed Halls, Empty Promises? Next to the church, the university may be the most enduring formal institution in our society. And like nearly every institution from banking to manufacturing to...
View ArticleThe Job Market Metric In Education
Post-secondary and continuing education is continuing to be rationalized in ways that are transforming the very foundation of the enterprise. Funding is a major driver of change in this field: how...
View ArticleThe Knowledge Metric in Education
Higher education is asking itself some big questions and making substantive changes to the way it sees itself and produces value for society. Education is increasingly being rationalized, which calls...
View ArticleThe Quality Metric in Education
What goes on the pedestal of learning? What is quality when we speak of learning? In this third post in series on education and evaluation metrics the issue of quality is within graduate and...
View ArticleMuch Ado About MOOC
It’s fair to imagine that one of the 2013 ‘words of the year‘ will be MOOC (which is not really a word, but an acronym that stands for Massive Open Online Course). It seems that everywhere you look in...
View ArticleScaling Education: The Absurd Case of the MOOC
Theatre at the Temple of Apollo The Chronicle of Higher Education (online) recently reported results of a survey looking at faculty teaching on MOOC’s (massive open online course) and found much...
View ArticleIntegrative Thinking And Empathy in Systems
Seeing What You’re Reaching For And With Award-winning Canadian author and University of Toronto professor David Gilmour came under social/media fire for comments made about his stance of only...
View ArticleEvaluation, Evidence and Moving Beyond the Tyranny of ‘I Think’
The concrete evidence for ‘I think’ Good evidence provides a foundation for decision-making in programs that is dispassionate, comparable and open to debate and view, yet often it is ignored in favour...
View ArticleBullying, the market for education and the damaged quest for learning
Dark classroom, light minds A recent study found looked into the experience of cyberbullying by university professors at the hands of their students. This disturbing phenomenon points to much larger...
View ArticleThe Quality Conundrum in Evaluation
One of the central pillars of evaluation is assessing the quality of something, often described as its merit. Along with worth (value) and significance (importance), assessing the merit of a program,...
View ArticleLearning: Bites, Snacks, and Meals
Media communications is trending toward generating content in small forms. What does small ‘snackable’ content mean for learning big things? It’s back to school time in many parts of the world and...
View ArticleFutures for Education, Learning and Work
Adapting to a changing world requires learning and models to support this that work when the old one’s no longer do. Scott Galloway — Prof G — is on a tear. In late June 2020 his name (and sometimes...
View ArticleTo Teach, To Learn: How Committed Are We to Both?
‘Back-to-school season offers a chance to revisit what education is for and what it could be. A few years ago I posted a question on this blog: How serious are we about learning? It remains one of the...
View ArticlePasts, Presents, and Futures
Our understanding of situations are co-constructed and that means our future is, too. Shaping our future — at least one we want — requires not only thinking about our present situation, but our past,...
View ArticleConference Season Here Again: What Have We Learned?
The autumn tends to be a time when many organizations hold conferences and this year is no different. What is different is that we are now in hybrid modes and questions remain about what we’ve learned...
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