Technology Implementation in Higher Ed: What do GRCC and Carnegie Mellon Have in Common?

On Friday I got a chance to pick the minds of two great individuals: Eric Kunnen of Grand Rapids Community College and Jay Brown of Carnegie Mellon.  The two might seem like they wouldn’t share too much in common, Kunnen is Coordinator of Instructional Technologies at an outstanding community college, and Brown is a Director [...]

Facebook for Alumni Associations: A Guide for Advancement Professionals

a video we made for alumni professionals
Alumni Associations on Facebook from Inigral Inc. on Vimeo.

Facebook Hits 100M Users

I met up with one of my friends at Facebook yesterday and he told me he and the rest of the company had been celebrating Facebook hitting 100Million users all day.  Zuckerberg took everyone out to a lawn in Palo Alto and gave a Jobsian “100M users isn’t just a company, its a movement” type [...]

Debunking the Creepy Treehouse: the Functional Mall.

I need to debunk the Creepy Treehouse, as it seems to have become some sort of rallying cry and is pulling people in the wrong direction.  I’m going to debunk it with contrarian metaphor: the Functioning Mall.  (If you come up with something more catchy, let me know.)
First off, let me tell you that the [...]

College Counselors in Middle School, Raising Expectations or Setting up for Failure?

Mildred Avenue Middle School in Boston will be the first middle school in Boston to get a full time college counseling office. 
I suspect – if other investments are not made in creating a more rigorous curriculum, teaching students to study and think independently, and guiding them through becoming fluent in written and mathematical analysis [...]

Cities in Crisis Addendum: How our Urban Schools Actually Fail

As a nation, we need to be thinking long and hard about how we’re failing our youth.  The school system, in particular, necessitates new diagnosis, new ideas, and immediate action.  One of my recurring theses – the overemphasis of core, academic subject areas at the expense of all else has the counterintuitive effect of lowering [...]

Content Knowledge is Dead

I heard Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason,” on the radio the other day using meaningless statistics about teenagers (and adults) ignorant of basic bits of content knowledge. Sure, it’s a little offensive that people can’t point out Iraq on a map when we’ve talked about it for six years. [...]

Get Your Fetus Ready For College.

 I made this post at CollegeRedi
 I found the No Excuses University Network, which is a set of schools at the K-8 levels determined to help students get ready for college.  That’s right, there are elementary schools that are a part of this.  This stems from the culture that’s been created in the wake of the [...]

Standards-Based Report Cards

The New York Times Opinion Page had a piece (which I seem to have misplaced) describing new report cards featuring state mandated standards from a parents perspective. They found the several page document bewildering, and this is coming from a member of the New York Times Editorial Staff. Imagine how the average mom [...]

Universities and Urban Renewal

The Chronicle of Higher Education podcast featured a talk with Oberlin College President Marvin Krisolv about the relationship between the College and the community of Oberlin.  Oberlin claims to be taking an active stake in the local economy, helping to invest in infrastructure and service programs as part of an Urban Renewal effort.  Having observed [...]

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