Federal report highlights the economic case for higher education — from educause.edu by Jaret Cummings

Excerpt:

The U.S. Departments of The Treasury and Education recently announced the release of a joint report highlighting the economic value of higher education achievement for individuals and the country as a whole. Entitled The Economics of Higher Education, the report confirms the continuing importance of postsecondary success to economic progress, including key findings such as the following…

From DSC:
Much of this is great — no doubt about it!  Now, the question is, how do we make higher education more accessible/affordable yet still maintain the quality? Along these lines, see:

After housing and the stock market, is higher education the next bubble to burst? — from forbes.com by Avi Dan

Excerpt:

Few industries today have a worse business model than higher learning institutions.

Simply put, colleges are slowly pricing themselves out of existence. Tuition has consistently increased faster than inflation and household income, to the point that it is now four times more expensive to attend college than it was a generation ago. The result is that the average college senior carries $25,000 in student loans at graduations. The debt can follow students around for years, sometimes to the end of time, literally: $36 billion in loan debt is held by people over 60-years old!

 

From DSC:
I’m not a political science expert and I won’t pretend to be one…but I did study economics and I don’t see what happened leading up to — and including — Tuesday night as any sort of victory or solid deal for America.  Delaying the tough decisions is not helping us — the time will come when we have to pay the piper.  Eventually, there will be pain. But will that pain start in 2013? I hope so. Because the longer the debt builds, the harder it will be to conquer it and the more pain we’ll need to get through (eventually).  In fact, eventually 100% of our taxes will go towards just paying the interest on the debt if we follow the current trajectories.  Printing more money won’t help the  situation either, as inflation is likely to escalate at that point.

Backing up a bit…here are some resources on what happened on Tuesday night with the Fiscal Cliff in the United States:

  • Obama signs bill warding off fiscal cliff — from CNN by Matt Smith
    Cliff deal hollow victory for American people — from CNN by David Rothkopf (CEO and editor-at-large of the FP Group, publishers of Foreign Policy magazine and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace)
    Excerpt:
    (CNN) — The last political drama of 2012 and the first one of 2013 suggest that if you love America, you might want to consider making your New Year’s resolution quitting whatever political party you belong to. The “fiscal cliff” debate and the last-minute deal it produced have so far resolved nothing except to show that our system is profoundly broken and that radical changes are needed to fix it.
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  • Fiscal cliff was bound to collapse — from CNN by Gloria Borger
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  • After the fiscal cliff: What comes next? — from macleans.ca and the AP
    Excerpt:
    By delaying painful decisions on spending cuts, the deal assures more confrontation and uncertainty, especially because Congress must reach agreement later this winter to raise the government’s debt limit. Many businesses are likely to remain wary of expanding or hiring in the meantime.

    Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist for the Economic Outlook Group, thinks the lack of finality in the budget fight is slowing an otherwise fundamentally sound economy. “What a shame,” Baumohl said in a research note Wednesday. “Companies are eager to ramp up capital investments and boost hiring. Households are prepared to unleash five years of pent-up demand.”
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  • 3 more fiscal cliffs loom — from CNN by Rich Barbieri

 

From DSC:
The media loves to divide. They hate to unite. Evidently, unity doesn’t pay the bills .

(BTW, to the remaining journalism majors out there — strive to build up and help our country, and try not to feed the flames of division just so that your organizations’ ratings go up.  Watch whose agendas are truly being served and the verbiage you use.  Unfortunately, as a Christian,  I can’t say much for the church, as there are fractions throughout the church as well.)

Getting back to what’s on my mind…delaying the pain is just making the future pain all the worse.  Let’s bite the bullet, compromise, work together, and go through the pain now rather than later.  If we wait too long, our children will be paying the price for our ways.

As educators, it looks like we need to beef up those parts of the curriculum that deal with collaboration and creative compromise!

 

CalvinsJanuarySeries2013

 

Calvin College: The January Series
Presentations begin 12:30 p.m. EST (11:30 a.m. CST, 10:30 a.m. MST, 9:30 a.m. PST)
NOTE: Due to contractual restrictions, a few of these presentations will not be recorded or archived.

More details here, but a listing of the speakers/topics include:

Thursday, January 3
Jeremy Courtney – “Restoring Hearts in Iraq”

Friday, January 4
Sheryl WuDunn – “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide”

Monday, January 7
Roberta Green Ahmanson – “Dreams Become Reality: Inspiration through the Arts”

Tuesday, January 8
Jenny Yang – “Welcoming the Stranger: Justice, Compassion and Truth in the Immigration Debate”

Wednesday, January 9
Richard J. Mouw & Robert Millet – “Evangelicals and Mormons: A Conversation and Dialogue”

Thursday, January 10
Peter Diamandis – “Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think”

Friday, January 11
Captain Scotty Smiley – “Hope Unseen”

Monday, January 14
Jeff Van Duzer – “Why Business Matters to God”

Tuesday, January 15
Rebecca Skloot – “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”

Wednesday, January 16
Cokie Roberts – “An Insider’s View of Washington DC”

Thursday, January 17
W. Dwight Armstrong – “Feeding the World and the Future of Farming”

Friday, January 18
Garth Pauley – “Rituals of Democracy: Inaugural Addresses in American History”

Monday, January 21
Robert Robinson – “Celebration through Gospel Music” in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

Tuesday, January 22
Mike Kim – “North Korea-China: A Modern Day Underground Railroad”

Wednesday, January 23
Chap Clark – “Sticky Faith”in partnership with the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship

The future of corporate innovation and entrepreneurship — from SteveBlank.com

Excerpt:

A New Strategy for Entrepreneurship in the 21st Corporation
Yet, simply focusing on improving existing business models is not enough anymore. To assure their survival and produce satisfying growth, corporations need to invent new business models. This challenge requires entirely new organizational structures and skills.

 

Strategyzer-BusModelInnovation-2012

 

Also see:

strategyzer.com

TheBusinessModelCanvas-2012

 

Citing IT skills shortage, IBM wants to expand presence at universities — from wiredacademic.com

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

“We want to be the scale up partner of choice for these universities,” said Jim Sporher, head of IBM’s university programs. “We want to make sure they have access to technology and understand our strategy.”  He also sees massive open online courses (MOOCs) as a mega-trend and will be considering ways for IBM to be part of the MOOC trend in the future, particularly as many of the MOOC providers such as Udacity and Coursera offer classes in computer science.

As a big blue-chip progenitor of the tech industry, IBM is worth listening to in many regards. For one, corporate computing trends often filter down into the education space. The corporate world often has the money to purchase and deploy game-changing technologies. IBM sees that it also works the other way too, where computing at the university level creates new businesses and ideas that move up into the corporate realm.

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From DSC:
I wonder…will the corporations develop their own MOOCs?  Their own digital “playlists” and associated exams? (i.e. that someone needs to go through and pass in order to work for them…show me what you can do.)  Hmmm…

Also see:

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McKinsey and Company -- Education to Employment -- An executive summary

 

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Also see:

 

 

Also see the following items from Genius:

  • The New Consumer Agenda:
    From authentic collaboration to small indulgences … what consumers want in 2013 and beyond, and how brands are responding.
  • Marketing Trends 2013+:
    From black marketing to crowd creatives, brand gaming to urban formats, solomo and diffusion … what will be big in marketing in 2013

 

Additional notes from DSC:

  • With thanks going out to Mr. Jim Woods (@hyperinnovation) on twitter for this resource
  • The wave-related graphics above are very appropriate for our times — and I’d rather be surfing the waves then being crushed by them!

 

 


From DSC:

I’ve been trying to figure out the best ways to incorporate a BYOD/BYOT into the Smart Classroom.  That is, how can students’ devices seamlessly communicate with the main displays around the classroom? How can they quickly display a blog posting or a Google doc for example…or play a song they wrote, etc.  So I was excited to wake up this morning with the following concept/idea:


 

The Internet of Things Ceiling -- A concept for our future Smart Classrooms by Daniel Christian in December 2012

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The Internet of Things Ceiling -- concept by Daniel Christian -  December 2012

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Other features/thoughts:

  • Line of sight communications — students must be in the room to display something up on the main displays
  • Information travels many ways:  From large multitouch displays/walls to students’ devices and vice versa; so a professor could hit “Save” in order to send his/her annotations to all of the students’ devices (allowing them to be more cognitively present — vs madly writing down what the professor is writing)
  • The Smart Classroom’s infrastructure becomes like a multi-thredded processor — instantaneously and simultaneously handling a far greater amount of data — going in multiple directions
  • What’s an interesting idea here is for discipline-specific, cloud-based storage mechanisms for students who want to contribute their pieces of content to their schools repositories of content
  • This topic reminds me of a graphic I created a while back, re: The “Chalkboard” of the Future:

 

 

 

So…what if the 4 screen’s on Julong’s Ultra-IPBOARD were coming from 4 different sources? Perhaps:

  1. One from a publisher’s cloud-based content repository
  2. Another from a stream of content originating from a student’s iPad
  3. Another from a stream of content originating from the Smart Classroom’s PC or Mac
  4. …and the last source originating from a student’s smartphone?

 

Demo for Ultra-IPBOARD

 

Also see:

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Learning Insights Report 2012 — from Kineo and elearningage.co.uk

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Actual report here:

Learning Insights Report 2012 -- from Kineo and elearningage.co.uk

 

How to disrupt yourself — from innovationexcellence.com by Greg Satell

Excerpts:

However, disruptive innovation happens in the face of no such threat, but when things are going great. Operations are profitable, the needs of the most demanding customers are being met and the business press applauds the company’s thoughtful and visionary leadership.

Then comes along something like Google or Netflix or social media and everything is turned upside down.

That’s what makes disruptive innovation so dangerous and so interesting. It upends an existing order that seems to be working well. The reality is that incumbent firms tend to get better and [better] at things people care less about. Eventually, the basis of competition will change and old metrics of success become useless.

The biggest innovation pitfall is falling into the myth of the mad scientist. People often assume it comes from the work of a lone genius – a Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison – who works behind closed doors and then one day comes out and shouts “Eureka!”

In actuality, innovation is combination. It most often arises through active collaboration among people with diverse skills and perspectives. That’s why so few enterprises can do it effectively. Large organizations breed conformity, strong leaders encourage a singular vision and don’t like to incorporate ideas that are off-script.

 

International Journal of Advanced Corporate Learning (iJAC) Vol 5, No 4 (2012)

Table of Contents

Papers

E-learning use patterns in the workplace – Web logs from interaction with a web based lecture PDF
Christian Ostlund pp. 4-8
A Human Resource Development Program for Information Technology Engineers using Project-Based Learning PDF
Minoru Nakayama, Manabu Fueki, Shinji Seki, Toshikazu Uehara, Kenji Matsumoto pp. 9-15
A Model for Teaching, Assessment and Learning in Engineering Education for Working Adults PDF
Kin Chew Lim, Stephen Low, Samir Attallah, Philip Cheang, Emet LaBoone pp. 16-21
Domain Ontology, an Instrument of Semantic Web Knowledge Management in e-Learning PDF
Anatoly Jasonovich Gladun, Julia Vitalijevna Rogushina, Jeanne Schreurs pp. 22-31
High Performance Work Systems as an Enabling Structure for Self-organized Learning Processes PDF
Thomas Wallner, Martin Menrad

 

pp. 32-37

 

Short Papers

Can Course Design in an Online MAT Program Promote Personalized Learning through e-Teaching and e-Learning Practices? PDF
Barbara Schwartz-Bechet pp. 38-41
E-Learning in Kazakhstan: Stages of Formation and Prospects for Development PDF
Daniyar Sapargaliyev

 

pp. 42-45

 

Calls

The International Conference on E-Learning in the Workplace – ICELW2013 PDF
Call for Papers

 

p. 4

 

 

Also see:

The training world is changing — from Harold Jarche

Excerpt:

Open online courses, talent management, social collaboration: The training world is changing. Traditional training structures, based on institutions, programs, courses and classes, are under pressure. One of the biggest changes we are seeing in online training is that the content-delivery model is being replaced by social and collaborative frameworks.

Here are just some of things happening now that trainers should be prepared to tackle in the new year:

Yahoo! and Samsung form multi-year partnership to deliver Interactive TV — from dailyfinance.com by Business Wirevia The Motley Fool
Partnership to provide real-time, enhanced entertainment and advertising to homes across the United States

Excerpt:

SUNNYVALE, Calif. & RIDGEFIELD PARK, N.J.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Yahoo! (NAS: YHOO) and Samsung today announced an expanded multi-year partnership to integrate Yahoo!’s Broadcast Interactivity platform into Samsung 2012 Smart TVs. Yahoo! Broadcast Interactivity, powered by its automatic content recognition (ACR) technology, SoundPrintTM, will be deployed in Samsung’s SyncPlus platform, enabling new opportunities for intelligent content discovery, advertising and engagement, bringing an unprecedented level of interactivity in the living room.

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From DSC:
Another steps towards:

 

The Living [Class] Room -- by Daniel Christian -- July 2012 -- a second device used in conjunction with a Smart/Connected TV

 

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A fifth of TV sets connected to the Internet by 2016 — from digitaltvresearch.com

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Welcome to Star Scholar U., where a personal brand is the credential — from The Chronicle by By Jeffrey R. Young

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Welcome to Star Scholar U 2

Keri Rasmussen for The Chronicle

Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason U., helped build an online-education site, Marginal Revolution U, based on a blog he runs with Alex Tabarrok. “In part we did it just to show it could be done—that you can have a Web site which looks nice and works,” Mr. Cowen said.

 

Excerpt:

A new kind of university has begun to emerge: Call it Star Scholar U.

Professors with large followings and technical prowess are breaking off to start their own online institutions, delivering courses with little or no backing from traditional campuses.

Founding a university may sound dramatic, but in an era of easy-to-use online tools it can be done as a side project—akin to blogging or writing a textbook. Soon there could be hundreds of Star Scholar U’s.

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5 perspectives on the future of the human interface — from techcrunch.com by Alex Williams

Excerpt:

The next generation of apps will require developers to think more of the human as the user interface. It will become more about the need to know how an app works while a person stands up or with their arms in the air more so than if they’re sitting down and pressing keys with their fingers.

Also see:

 

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Rethinking carrots: A new method for measuring what players find most rewarding and motivating about your game — from gamasutra.com by Scott Rigby, Richard Ryan

Excerpt:

The Player Experience of Need Satisfaction model (PENS) outlines three basic psychological needs, those of competence, autonomy, and relatedness, that we have demonstrated lie at the heart of the player’s fun, enjoyment, and valuing of games. By collecting players’ reports of how these needs are being satisfied, the PENS model can strongly and significantly predict positive experiential and commercial outcomes, in many cases much more strongly than more traditional measures of fun and enjoyment. And despite the simplicity of the model conceptually, it shows promise as a “unified theory” of the player experience by demonstrating predictive value regardless of genre, platform, or even the individual preferences of players.

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Pearson project will let professors mix free and paid content in e-textbooks — from The Chronicle by Alisha Azevedo

Excerpt:

Pearson, a major textbook publisher, continued its push into digital education on Monday by introducing a service that allows instructors to create e-textbooks using open-access content and Pearson material.

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A river of data — from educationnext.org by Bror Saxberg
Making the learning experience more effective

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How should teaching change in the age of Siri?– from MindShift

Excerpt:

 Short of banning smartphones (a short-term solution, at best), the evolution of artificial intelligence services like Siri means that there will be a shift from a focus on finding the answer as the endpoint to a greater focus on analysis. You have the answer, but so what? What does that answer mean in a real-life situation?

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Degreed launches crowdfunding campaign for reimagined ‘digital diploma’ — from gigaom.com by Ki Mae Heussner
San Francisco startup Degreed is challenging the traditional college diploma with an online service that tracks and scores educational achievements from established institutions as well as new online learning platforms. Ahead of a public launch in 2013, Degreed this week began a crowd funding campaign.

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A capitalist’s dilemma, whoever wins on Tuesday — from the New York Times by Clayton Christensen

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

In a way, this mirrors the microeconomic paradox explored in my book “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” which shows how successful companies can fail by making the “right” decisions in the wrong situations. America today is in a macroeconomic paradox that we might call the capitalist’s dilemma. Executives, investors and analysts are doing what is right, from their perspective and according to what they’ve been taught. Those doctrines were appropriate to the circumstances when first articulated — when capital[From DSC: or from an educational perspective, we could use the word information] was scarce.

But we’ve never taught our apprentices that when capital is abundant and certain new skills are scarce, the same rules are the wrong rules. Continuing to measure the efficiency of capital prevents investment in empowering innovations that would create the new growth we need because it would drive down their RONA, ROCE and I.R.R.

 

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Gartner sees 821M unit smart device mkt in 2012; 1.2B 2013 — from forbes.com by Eric Savitz

 

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© 2024 | Daniel Christian