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So Last Century: Hightlights from Times Higher Ed Cover Story

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I’m delighted my Cover Story, “So Last Century,” about the state of current higher education–how we got this way and how we can do better–just came out in Times Higher Education (UK). It is already being circulated to deans and college presidents, according to various emails and Facebook postings and tweets I’m reading. Here are some highlights to whet your appetite: the lead, a few tidbits, some promising programs that are prototyping change—and the url.

Googlizing the Taylorization of Everything

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The ways our two books intersect is that Now You See It proposes institutional and personal strategies for dealing with the googlization of everything. The current worlds of work and school are inheritances; they evolved as ways of dealing with the 20th century’s Taylorization of everything. There is no better analysis than Siva Vaidhyanathan’s of why we should worry about the Googlization of everything. I’m proposing productive ways to transform our 21st century worries into an impetus for change, for systematic rethinking of how we live, work, and learn in what, as Siva Vaidhyanathan so eloquently and persuasively argues, is the Empire of Google.

Teaching MBA's to Tweet

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Here’s the bottomline: You do not understand social media by teaching business students how to Tweet. Understanding the importance of social media today requires deep social rethinking and it also requires reimagining education for the digital age

Want to Pay More Attention? Distract Yourself!

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You open the front door and are overwhelmed by the most fantastic, enticing, delicious cooking smells. Half an hour later, you can’t even smell them anymore. Your senses are dulled by familiarity . It turns out the same is true for thoughts.

Scaling John Seely Brown

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I recently had occasion to talk on the phone with someone whose posts on education and social media I follow with interest on Twitter. ToughLoveforX (his Twitter name) is a retired printer whose scan of the educational horizon in the digital age is as eagle-eyed as that of anyone I know. I follow him on Twitter because I know that, if I click through to one of the url’s he posts, I’m bound to find something good. When I asked him what he would do, if he could make one monumental change that would have an impact on the worlds of learning and social media, he said, “Scale John Seely Brown.” Perfectly to the point of my question. Perfectly Twitter. You cut right to the chase when you think in 140 characters or less. Scaling John Seely Brown is an awfully good idea.

Designing Our Learning Futures

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Designing Future of Learning Conference Draws 500 Thought Leaders, Innovators, Designers, Educators, Activists to Long Beach—-and that has to be good for our kids and the future of higher education. HASTAC, the organization I cofounded in 2002, administers the annual HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition to identify, support, and then mentor to success teams of people who are figuring out brilliant new ways for us to learn together. This year’s winners will be showcasing their projects at this conference. I’ll be on two panels. There will a science fair, a hundred or so kids coming to the Showcase . . . and we’ll be tweeting and blogging about all of it, and videocasting too, so you can see what we are all up to on behalf of our kids’ future (and our own).

Why IBM's Watson Is Dumber than a 5th Grader

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I know you saw IBM’s impressive Watson robot/computer/cyborg wipe the floor with some of Jeopardy’s smartest winners this week. There is no question that it is brilliant AI (Artificial Intelligence) programming and that the team of computer scientists, coders, linguists, and other knowledge-makers have done an incredible job pushing robotics forward. But is Watson smarter than a 5th grader? Short answer: no. Longer answer: well, in some things he is lots smarter and in others, he doesn’t stand a chance.

Education 2.0 in BBC Focus Magazine

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Internet instead of universities? This article features HASTAC and Cathy N. Davidson’s “crowdsourced grading,” and looks at how the web is inspiring a revolution in higher education. Just as we expect easy access to information on the internet, the open education movement is shaking up the traditional education system by making teaching resources available for … Education 2.0 in BBC Focus Magazine