Tag: Technology

Worst Higher Education Article of the Decade (So Far)

Stop the presses.  I have found the worst education article of the decade so far.  It is by Don & Alex Tapscott, and it is called The Blockchain Revolution and Higher Education. How dumb is it?  Solar-powered flashlight dumb.  Tripping over a cordless phone dumb. The problem is that because it’s Don Tapscott and he is – for reasons that are completely beyond me – treated as some kind of national gem, no one ever calls him on his deep wrongness

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A New Logo for Canadian Higher Education

Last week, the government of Canada announced to great fanfare (Hip Hip Hooray! Caloo Callay!) that Canada has a new international education brand.  They actually meant “logo” not “brand”, but whatever – long past due because the old logo was terrible.  To wit:           Ridiculous, right?  “Education in/au Canada”?  Most students who want to come study in Canada do so in order to improve their English, and Ottawa comes up with a logo that requires you to

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The Future of Work (and What it Means for Higher Education), Part 2

Yesterday we looked at a few of the hypotheses out there about how IT is destroying jobs (particularly: good jobs).  Today we look at how institutions should react to these changes. If I were running an institution, here’s what I’d do: First, I’d ask every faculty to come up with a “jobs of the future report”.  This isn’t the kind of analysis that makes sense to do at an institutional level: trends are going to differ from one part of the

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The Future of Work (and What it Means for Higher Education), Part 1

Back in the 1990s when we were in a recession, Jeremy Rifkin wrote a book called The End of Work, which argued that unemployment would remain high forever because of robots, information technology, yadda yadda, whatever.  Cue the longest peacetime economic expansion of the century. Now, we have a seemingly endless parade of books prattling on about how work is going to disappear: Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s The Second Machine Age, Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots, Jerry Kaplan’s Humans Need not Apply, Susskind and Susskind’s The Future of the Professions: How Technology will Transform

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Innovation Ecosystems: Promise and Opportunism

We sometimes think of innovation policy as being about generating better ideas through things like sponsored research.  And that’s certainly one part of it.  But if those ideas are generated in a vacuum, they go nowhere – making ideas spread faster is the second pillar of innovation policy (a third pillar – to the extent that innovation is about new product-generation – has to do with venture capital and regulatory environments, but we’ll leave those aside for now). Yesterday, I discussed why the key to speeding up

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