The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Tag: Technology

Why Ottawa Can’t Do the Knowledge Economy

I have read two very interesting things in the past couple of weeks. One is Justin Ling’s excellent piece in the Toronto Star about the inner workings of the Carney PMO and what the government thinks it’s accomplishing (tl;dr: as efficient and business-like as the new PMO is, it isn’t actually trying to fix what’s broken in Ottawa because it often doesn’t know what the actual problem is). And the second is Jeffrey Ding’s excellent new book Technology and the

Read More »
October 7, 2026 No Comments

Some Thoughts on the Use of AI in Teaching

I spent part of last week in Tempe at Arizona State University’s conference on Agentic AI and the Student Experience, which was a pretty interesting event. It made me think awhile about AI in higher education, which I thought I’d share with y’all. My POV on this basically comes down to six things: That last one is the most important. I’ll expand on it.  Higher education, being as near to eternal as any institution can be, constantly lives with technological changes. In

Read More »
October 29, 2025 2 Comments

A Tech Talent University?

Late last week, Sheldon Levy, former President of Sheridan College & Ryerson University, former Deputy Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities of Ontario, and current Interim President of University Canada West (UCW) wrote an op-ed in the Globe and Mail about the tech talent shortage in Canada and why existing universities may not be up to the challenge of ending it.  When someone like Sheldon Levy talks, everyone should listen. The op-ed is a follow-up to a white paper that

Read More »
February 23, 2022 No Comments

A Very Canadian Innovation Proposal

If you let any conversation about innovation policy go on long enough, the story of DARPA (the Defence Advance Research Projects Agency, known as ARPA until 1972, and, weirdly, between 1993 and 1996) will likely come up, usually in a form so tortured that it is unrecognizable from the real thing.  This matters because the Business Council of Canada has just backed the idea of a Canadian DARPA as a solution to the country’s innovation woes.  This is, I think, a bad idea,

Read More »
March 3, 2021 1 Comment

Getting A Head Start on the Next Tech Panic

One of the things that makes the “tech” industry in Canada is that it is basically not a tech industry at all.  If you look at the major publicly-traded companies in Canada which could reasonably be described as “tech”, what you see is mostly a collection of e-commerce platforms plus some enterprise software companies.  We have a few equipment makers (Sierra Wireless, Evertz, Photon) whose annual revenues combined are smaller than York University’s budget.  And there’s Ballard, which is in

Read More »
January 12, 2021 No Comments
Load More

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...