Audrey beat me to reviewing Morozov’s latest book, and as is often the case when Audrey digs deep into something, there isn’t a whole lot left to say. I encourage people to read her exhaustive analysis. To me, the book ended up being a systematic treatment of an issue that I have been struggling with Continue reading

Back in August last year, I wrote a piece on How MOOCs Could Kill Higher Education. In the scenario presented, the first step was this: In public education, the problem has the potential to get bad quite quickly. Imagine a legislature that says that the state colleges must provide a path to credit through MOOCs Continue reading

This chart, showing electrodermal activity believed to be associated with “cognitive stress” is making the educational blog rounds recently: The thing generating interest in the blogs, of course, is the flatlining you’re seeing in the class segment, which lends it to the catchy soundbite that “Lectures produce no more cognitive activity than TV.” Of course, Continue reading

So for reasons not worth going into (OK, Twitter spat), I became interested in whether my understanding of Schumpeter and his Marx-inspired theory of “creative destruction” was wrong. I have a bit of an allergic reaction to the term, which I associate with CEOs shrugging off layoffs as “churn” and taking the Jack Welch position Continue reading

I’ve leaked this out on Twitter, Facebook, and in personal conversations, but I’ve put off writing a blog post about it because I find it very hard to do justice to the people I’ve worked with at Keene State in a goodbye. So let me just say that despite crushing state cuts, constant friction, and Continue reading

So a funny thing I never realized before last Sunday — Sugata Mitra, the informal learning darling of the hour, was part of the NIIT team that did a leveraged buyout of the company I worked for in 2003. And NIIT still owns it. That’s interesting, since what Cognitive Arts does (or at least used Continue reading