Phoenix rising

by | Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Mark Ambinder at the Politics blog at the Atlantic

President Obama plans to name Howard A. Schmidt, a veteran cyber security warrior with experience at senior levels of government and industry, to fill a long-anticipated cyber coordinator position at the National Security Council, administration officials and outside consultants confirmed.

As far as one can see Mr. Schmidt is well qualified for this position, having served both in industry and in the government in the past. However, one fact about his background caught my attention and prompted this note. In describing his qualifications Ambinder wrote

Schmidt has credentials unique to the job: he received his masters in organizational management from the University of Phoenix, a (fully accredited and esteem) mostly online university.

Apart from the typo on esteem, what struck me was this positive mention of the University of Phoenix, something I often do not see or hear. Over where I live and breathe, the good old-fashioned bricks-and-mortar university, the University of Phoenix is not regarded as having much esteem. I have argued here and elsewhere that this will soon change. That most of us at the “traditional” university have underestimated just how powerful the forces of change are. Online learning (and for profit universities) are here to stay and maybe even take over universities as we know them.

Reading about Mr. Schmidt’s credentials just reminded me just how quickly this change is happening.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

TPACK & Creativity at Twente

I just finished a marathon session of presentations and discussions with the master's students in Curriculum Development and Educational Innovation at Twente University. It was wonderful to meet with them and discuss creativity, teaching, design, TPACK, among other...

EduSummIT 2015: Summary Report

EDUsummIT 2015 (International Summit on ICT in Education) is a global knowledge building community of researchers, educational practitioners, and policy makers committed to supporting the effective integration of research and practice in the field of ICT in...

Finding Nemo, the sea-quel

Our family's stop-motion animation festival continues with our latest offering: Finding Nemo, the sea-quel!!  This movie was conceptualized by Shreya and filmed by all of us over a couple of days. What was interesting about this movie was just how many...

When Tools Become Culture

When Tools Become Culture

In my doctoral seminar last Monday, I started class as I always do - with a "This Day in History" moment. Essentially Nicole Oster and I spend a bit of time digging through that date’s Wikipedia page finding interesting nuggets that connect with topics we are...

Ganapati Festival Photographs, 2011

The Hindu god Ganesh (the elephant-headed one) is celebrated across India, and the world, around this time of the year. The Hindu community in Lansing is no exception. A couple of days ago I was asked to take pictures of a music program at the local temple. It was a...

Reimagining conteXt in TPACK: New article

Reimagining conteXt in TPACK: New article

Back in September I wrote a long-ish blog post about something that had bothered me for years and years about the canonical TPACK diagram. It had to do with how contextual knowledge was represented in the diagram, or rather how it was not represented in the diagram....

Ambigrams and the creative process

I received an email out of the blue from Nikita Prokhorov, a freelance graphic designer and assistant professor of graphic design from Connecticut. Nikita runs a blog devoted ambigrams, but in a different kind of way. As the email said, the blog is "devoted to the art...

Creativity & Courage

Creativity & Courage

Here is the next article in our series Rethinking Technology & Creativity in the 21st Century for the journal TechTrends. This article features an interview with Dr. Yong Zhao, Foundation Distinguished Professor in the School of Education at...

Thanks Wipro & Microsoft

#MSUrbanSTEM Thanks Wipro! #MSUrbanSTEM Thanks Microsoft Over this past summer I have had one of the best teaching/learning experiences of my career. Through a project funded by Wipro (and with support from Microsoft) we have the opportunity to work with 125 teachers...

1 Comment

  1. Andy

    I agree Punya… what a degree “is” is quickly changing, must change. The higher ed bureaucracy hasn’t shown, in my opinion, the ability to adapt quickly enough in this rapidly changing environment/economy (if it had, Phoenix would have died out by now) — which is sad because the Academy used to be a prominent agent of change, I think.

    Reply

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