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Category: Now Reading

Humans Wanted

On Monday, the Royal Bank put out an interesting…well, what was it?  Research Paper?  Discussion Paper?  Idea-concept thingy?…called Humans Wanted: How Canadian Youth Can Thrive in the Age of Disruption.  It’s a bit of a mixed bag as a paper, but ultimately it’s not a bad start to the RBC’s “FutureLaunch” project on youth and skills. The core of the paper is an examination of jobs and skills in the new economy, their vulnerability to automation and their growth potential using

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March 28, 2018 1 Comment

Friday Book Reviews

Four books that have been across my desk recently: Higher Education Accountability. This is a short and sweet book by Seton Hall prof Robert Kelchen which provides maybe the best taxonomy of accountability measures in higher education measures I have ever seen.  Internal/external, to government, to the public – you name it, its in there, all with copious references to major events in US higher ed over the past ten years.  It perhaps occasionally resembles notes for a course a bit

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March 23, 2018 No Comments

University Commons Divided

A couple of months ago I reviewed Christopher Newfield’s The Great Mistake and said it was a great book that was very much worth reading, despite the fact that I disagreed with its central premise.  Well, I have another one of those, and it’s Peter MacKinnon’s new book: University Commons Divided: Exploring Debate and Dissent on Campus. What MacKinnon – ex-President of the University of Saskatchewan (1999-2012) and Athabasca University (2014-2016)  – has produced is a truly marvellous re-cap of all the major

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March 16, 2018 No Comments

Robot-Proof

If you’re looking for a book that is not too heavy, analyzes how changing technologies impacts skills, and does a great job of sketching out some possible attractive responses from higher education institutions: have I got a book for you.  It’s called Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Joseph Aoun. You’re surprised, I can tell.  The book does have the kind of title that suggests it has a point of view that ordinarily would set me off on

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March 1, 2018 1 Comment

Science Federalism

A couple of months ago, I read a rather interesting book called National Innovation Systems and the Academic Enterprise, which is a collection of essays edited by David Dill and Frans van Vught.  It’s a collection of essays about national – and in the case of the US, subnational – innovation policies, and while the quality of the national essays is a bit uneven (the Canadian one was marked mainly by overuse of the word “neoliberalism” and excessive off-point moaning about

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February 14, 2018 2 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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