In this season of thankfulness, IICE is thankful FOR YOU!
A Picture of Higher Ed’s Future
The future of higher education can be sobering, but with great leadership and a solid plan, institutions can weather the storm.
Trend Spotting
What will colleges and universities do about the student debt crisis, the affordability crisis, and the learning crisis?
Education in 2050?
What will education look like in the future? While it has not changed much in the last 100 years, there is every likelihood it will look very different in the next 25…
Holiday Reading List
Here is a potential list of some great reads. Yes, you will find “learning” as a thread that binds them all, but most of these books were not authored with educators as the primary audience.
The Fifth Discipline – Revisited
Having taken all manner of personality indicators, I agree with their consistent findings that people who do not perform effectively, in a collaborative fashion, nor with a proper prioritization of goals, are easily waived off in my brain as “morons.” I struggle to give second chances and I quickly look for workarounds to people and departments that appear obstructivistic regarding forward thinking initiatives, student support, or even student learning, etc.
Innovation 101
Google it. Explore if through ERIC. Do what you do so well! Research the idea, the strategy, etc. See how other schools have done it, or alternatively, see if there are reasons schools have chosen NOT to do something. Look at the business stream in which the initiative was accomplished and then ask how it might be performed in a your specific higher education context. Ping your network and ask colleagues what they think. Go to Twitter or LinkedIn and create a post about it, looking for comments and feedback. Just noodle with it. Even if you finally conclude that it can’t work or if you never end up using it, the continual practice will help. See, as you collect more and more of those ideas, you’ll start to have a throng of options available when the right day comes.
Lying With Data Is Easy – Telling The Truth Without It Is Hard
Data has just danced around the edges of usefulness for most colleges and universities over time. We have MOUNDS of data, right? We have historical data going back decades. Granted, it’s mostly on paper, in cabinets, locked away in a storage room we only open every seven years, brushing off dust and cobwebs like an Indiana Jones film so as to cherry pick the best data to show accreditors…but it’s there.
Unintended Consequences
A course based mostly on lecture has negative consequences. A campus where student affairs and academic affairs don’t legitimately work together has negative consequences. Schools that resist online learning have unseen negative consequences for students, just as schools who bound into eLearning without strategic considerations for quality and scale also see negative consequences. Faculty Development being left solely to the discretion of the faculty can have negative consequences. Athletics integration on campus can have negative consequences. Hiding school email addresses from the public can have negative consequences. Creating a school website for marketing purposes and ignoring current students, faculty, and staff can have negative consequences. Recruiting volunteer faculty as adjuncts can have negative consequences. And on and on and on…
Connectedness
He then showed a US map of social media sites trolling for young inductees which ranged from racist to anarchist. How were they finding new participants? Connection. They were working to connect these teens via social media to fallacious arguments that “felt good” to young, manipulable minds. They would find connection points with family, friends, religion, justice, and the list goes on. But the strategy was the same. Connect. Because once connected, it was very hard to disconnect.