More Than Just a Good I.D.E.A.

There's a lot of talk going on in the political sphere about equity and diversity initiatives, and there's a lot of work going on in both educational and corporate settings around diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. This post is less about the talk (although I hope it might inform it in a useful way), and more about the work. To begin with, let's operate under the assumption that everyone working in this area is approaching it with the best of intentions (even when their organizational motivation is profit), and that the biggest issues that arise in this work are actually results of bungling the implementation. With all of that in mind, I want you to consider the possibility that the biggest issue starts with the fact that we keep putting the letters in the wrong order.

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The Purposes of Post-Secondary Education

In my previous blog post on systems of stress I traversed a fair amount of my professional and personal experiences from 2017. I also got into some contentious political topics, especially in relation to higher ed. A casual read of that post might lead you to conclude that I have a fairly narrow belief about the purpose of post-secondary education, and that I’m dismissive of vocational outcomes in higher ed. Nothing could be further from the truth. This post aims to provide a bit of clarification, because this is in truth a complicated topic.

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Systems of Stress

This is a post about individuals and conflict behaviors, but more than that it’s about systems and how they elicit those behaviors. This post gets pretty personal at times, but the intent is not to air my or anyone else’s dirty laundry. The aim instead is to draw on experiences during an extremely difficult time in my life that also became entwined with professional failure, but to look beyond those individual stresses and failures at the bigger picture, and to say something (hopefully useful) about how individuals respond to pressures well outside of their control. Caveat emptor, this post is also very long.

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Finding a Place for Gamification - DT&L 2015

In early August 2015 I gave a speed talk at the UW Distance Teaching & Learning conference on gamification and learning. The speed talk format is a bit different from the pecha kucha and other related formats in that there is no slide limit, and and time limit is ten minutes. That's just enough time to get yourself in trouble! Link for the slides after the jump.

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Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, & the Skills Gap

I'd like to spill just a few words on the topic of critical thinking and problem solving which I've started exploring in relation to the so called "skills gap." To make a long story short, there's a whole lot of noise out there at current around how underprepared colllege students are from the perspective of employers. There are a lot of dimensions to this conversation, but I'd like to focus on just one of them. A significant amount of research has been conducted asking employers about the skills they believe prospective employees should have (here's an example), and there are consistent themes that come up. One of them, regardless of how the question is asked, seems to be that employers want new hires who are strong critical thinkers and have excellent problem solving skills. I believe that these responses are indicative of a serious problem, and it's probably not what you think it is.

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