"Predicting the future is easy. It's trying to figure out what's going on now that's hard" (Dressler, 2005)
As we approach the end of Spring semester in GRAD-602, our students are beginning to submit their reflections on the book they read for the course. They had a choice of five books: Ambrose, S. et. al. (2010). How Learning Works: 7 Research-based Principles for Smart Teaching Bain, K. (2011). What the Best College Teachers… Read more Evangelizing Teaching
Back on March 5th, my colleague Enoch Hale posted a challenge on his blog: “I want to pose an open challenge: Post an out-of-the-box question about teaching and learning each day for 30 days.” I took him up on his challenge…though I suggested “thirty work days”…to which he agreed. Over the past six weeks, we… Read more 30-Day Challenge – Day 30 – The Questions I Did Not Ask
A decade ago, Ernst and Young led a strategic visioning retreat for the technical college where I worked. Over three days, a mix of college leadership and faculty met in a big room high above the Atlanta scene, looking out over both the city and Stone Mountain in the distance. The room was reconfigured each… Read more 30-Day Challenge – Day 27 – Future Proofing
My colleague Jon Becker in our Office of Online Academic Programs here at VCU posted an interesting Twitter conversation in his blog post today. He noted that it started with a live tweet by Jesse Stommel of Jim Groom’s presentation at #et4online. Derek Bruff responded with what he tagged an honest question, and Jon responded… Read more 30-Day Challenge – Day 25 – The Training Wheel Question
This 30-Day Challenge has been intellectually stimulating for me. Enoch Hale challenged us to ask “out-of-the-box” questions about teaching and learning…which is fun in some ways and very challenging in other ways. It has definitely not led (for me) to “the same old thinking.” Our hallway conversations have been just as fun…and have focused on… Read more 30-Day Challenge – Day 22 – Asking the Wrong Questions
This past weekend, I was in a blog dialogue with “DogBiscuit123” – a bright teaching coach in the midwest. We were discussing the changing nature of work and how it impacted education. In his post, he talked about the arc of change over the past decade, with one-to-one initiatives, BYOD and mobile programs, and an… Read more 30 Day Challenge – Day 20 – The New Nomads
Last week, I stumbled upon an EdTechReview blog post out of India on “How Curriculum for 21st Century Must Look Like?“. One of the things I treasure about my PLN is the alternative viewpoints that come out of Europe, Asia, South America and Australia. Granted that while different, higher education is really not that different…we… Read more 30 Day Challenge – Day 18 – The Imagination Spiral
The NMC Horizon Report Higher Education Edition for 2014 lists six challenges which the review panel believes are very likely to impede technology adoption over the next five years. These challenges are sorted into three categories defined by the nature of the challenge — solvable challenges are those that we both understand and know how… Read more 30 Day Challenge – Day 11 – Relevancy
Grant McCracken, in “The Corporation is at Odds with the Future,” noted: “Here is my present idea of the corporation, give or take. The corporation is a thing of people, processes, places, and products (give or take). And these 4 Ps are relatively well-defined, organized, boundaried, and anchored (more or less).“ In many ways, this describes… Read more 30 Day Challenge – Day 6 – A State of Surprise
Yesterday, Enoch Hale started us on a 30-Day Challenge to post an out-of-the-box question about teaching and learning each day for thirty days. I responded yesterday with a question about design and whether it was complicated or complex. My question today really dates back to a wonderful book by Tom Peters, who in 2003 published… Read more 30 Day Question Challenge – Day 2 – Hyperlinked Course