Education Technology and the Future of Academic Freedom

It was one of the most frequently repeated stories of the year: college students, particularly left-leaning college students, are intolerant… If it sounds like a caricature… well, it is. If nothing else, pundits and politicians seem to forget that the majority of college students do not attend private institutions like Columbia or Middlebury or even…

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Integrative Learning in Higher Education

Integrative learning … which develops the ability to think broadly and connect ideas across disciplines and to the outside world, has become a buzzword among academic managers who see it as a way to make general education meaningful and useful, and to realize the aims of liberal education. Read the story in The Chronicle of…

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Why Germany Is So Much Better at Training Its Workers

Excerpt from The Atlantic — October 2014 The U.S. has its own tradition of apprenticeship going back many years. But like most kinds of vocational education, it fell out of fashion in recent decades—a victim of our obsession with college and concern to avoid anything that resembles tracking. Today in America, fewer than 5 percent…

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How to Kickstart Your Data Science Career

If you’re an aspiring data scientist but still processing your data in Excel, you might want to upgrade your toolset.  Why?  Firstly, while advanced features like Excel Pivot tables can do a lot, they don’t offer nearly the flexibility, control, and power of tools like SQL, or their functional equivalents in Python (Pandas) or R…

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These Will Be The Top Jobs In 2025 (And The Skills You’ll Need To Get Them)

It’s no surprise that tech skills will be in demand. However, [Devin Fidler at the Institute of the Future] says that ‘computational thinking’—the ability to manage the massive amounts of data we process individually each day, spot patterns, and make sense out of all of it—will be valued. Related jobs: Software developer jobs will grow…

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Hitchhiker’s Guide to Data Science and Machine Learning

Thousands of articles and tutorials have been written about data science and machine learning. Hundreds of books, courses and conferences are available. You could spend months just figuring out what to do to get started, even to understand what data science is about. In this short contribution, I share what I believe to be the…

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Seven Things Higher Education Innovators Want You to Know

 Excerpt from Campus Technology — March 2016 “If you think the great colleges and universities of the past will be the only great colleges and universities in the future, then you’ve forgotten everything you knew about evolution and you need to up your game,” asserted Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University.   “Our society…

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Disruptive innovation in higher education

From Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, Louis Caldera, and Louis Soares: Disruptive innovation is the process by which a sector that has previously served only a limited few, because its products and services were complicated, expensive, and inaccessible, is transformed into one whose products and services are simple, affordable, and convenient and serves many…

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Video: James Martin on the challenges of the 21st century

“At the start of the 21st century, humankind finds itself on a non-sustainable course – a course that, unless it is changed, will lead to catastrophes of awesome consequences. At the same time, we are unlocking formidable new capabilities that could lead to much more exciting lives and glorious civilizations. “This could be humanity’s last…

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America’s misguided culture of overwork

So much of the American economy is based on GDP that comes from waste, environmental pillage, urban sprawl, bad planning, people going farther and farther with no land use planning whatsoever, and leading more miserable lives. … What country has the highest exports in the world today? It’s the country with the highest wage rates…

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Henry Jenkins’ USC course on civic media

Civic Media is any use of any technology for the purposes of increasing civic engagement and public participation, enabling the exchange of meaningful information, fostering social connectivity, constructing critical perspectives, insuring transparency and accountability, or strengthening citizen agency. Excerpts from: Civic Media: A Syllabus.

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