Tralee back nine

When I started this blog, I said I would generally write about issues related to higher education, but once in a while I would write about subjects or hobbies that personally interest me like golf.

I’ve been playing golf for almost 30 years, but haven’t found the time to hit the links for more than a couple of rounds  in the past year or so.  I love the game, though.  Through business and some great friends, I have had the good fortune to be able to play many great courses around the United States and overseas:  Pine Valley, Oakmont, Baltusrol, Merion, Oak Hill, Pinehurst #2, Congressional, Baltimore Country Club, Doral, Pebble Beach, Spyglass, Ballybunion, Lahinch, Doonbeg, Old Head, Tralee, Royal County Down, and Portmarnock to name a few.  I have yet to make a hole-in-one, but have made five eagles on par-4’s which is a supposedly harder feat, but there’s no celebratory tradition similar to a hole-in-one.

My wife and I enjoy watching some of the major tournaments in person.  We have attended the U.S. Open (men and women’s), the PGA, the Masters, and the Ryder Cup.  We had a busy schedule this year and have not been able to make any of the tournaments.  However, this weekend, the Sr. PGA Tour Championship will be played in Baltimore at the Baltimore Country Club.  In recent years, the PGA and PGA Tour have provided free admission for tournament events to active duty and retired soldiers, sailors, and airmen.  The PGA recruits sponsors at each of the tournament locations to subsidize some of their charitable activities.  We were asked if APUS would consider sponsoring the hospitality tent for active duty and retired military personnel and we agreed given Baltimore’s proximity to our locations in Charles Town, West Virginia and Manassas, Virginia as well as many military personnel and many of our students stationed within a 75 mile radius of Baltimore.

We’ll have people in the tent and on the course throughout the weekend.  Our location is near the 17th tee, which is ideal for the closing holes of a close tournament.  If you’re in Baltimore and the weather looks nice, stop by and say hello.  If I happen to be in the tent and not on the course, I’ll  be glad to talk about golf or higher education.

Earlier in the month, one of my colleagues sent me a link to an article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, titled “The Ugly Secret Why Tuition Costs a Fortune.”  The article notes that in today’s somewhat unstable economy, the cost of most consumer goods are falling, yet higher education has somehow managed to insulate itself from this fundamental economic trend.  Examining why this has been the case, the article pulls from evidence found in Mark Bauerlein’s paper published by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, “Professors on the Production Line, Students On Their Own.”

Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, offers an eye-opening explanation of a starting trend in academia: the “publish or perish” dilemma facing young professors hoping to be hired or veteran faculty members on the path to tenure.  According to Bauerlein, between 1980 and 2006, William Faulkner garnered some “3,584 books, chapters, dissertations, articles, notes, reviews, and editions.”  In the same time period, Charles Dickens elicited 3,437 studies.  While there can be little question that scholarly critical works on these authors and others are worthwhile for full understanding of their works, one must begin to question how many works on any one author are required before the topic becomes “overdone.”  Bauerlein cites that the demand for a new book in the English literature area rarely exceeds 300 copies.

Read the rest of this entry »

I placed a pre-publication order for Curtis Bonk’s latest book, The World is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education, and was not disappointed when it arrived.  Bonk, Professor of Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University, identifies ten key trends in technology that are impacting education as we know it.  He has coined an acronym, WE-ALL-LEARN, for those trends that are identified as:

• Web Searching in the World of e-Books
• E-Learning and Blended Learning
• Availability of Open Source and Free Software
• Leveraged Resources and OpenCourseWare
• Learning Object Repositories and Portals
• Learner Participation in Open Information Communities
• Electronic Collaboration
• Alternate Reality Learning
• Real-Time Mobility and Portability
• Networks of Personalized Learning

Read the rest of this entry »

In the September 14, 2009 issue of Business Week, Stephen Baker and Arik Hesseldahl pen an interesting article about Lifelogs.  The bulk of the article is about Gordon Bell, a 75-year-old computer science legend who works for Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley, California (yes, the Gordon Bell of Digital Equipment Corp and Carnegie Mellon fame, and who as Chair of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Cross Agency Committee probably had a lot more to do with the creation of the internet than former Senator and Vice President Al Gore).  Gordon Bell is also the creator of Bell’s Law, a much more esoteric computer science law dealing with classes of computers than Moore’s Law, but which uses Moore’s Law relating to computational power of computer chips to explain how classes of computers are formed every ten years and how former classes of computers evolve and/or die.

For the past ten years, Gordon Bell has been creating a Lifelog of, what else, his life.  He wears a camera called a SenseCam which takes photos every few minutes or whenever the light changes indicating that the wearer has moved into a new area.  Bell also takes pictures himself and records his phone conversations.  He maps the area where he walks and scans all papers that he encounters that are worth saving.  He has recently co-authored a book with Jim Gemmell about his experiences entitled Total Recall:  How the e-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything.  Bell argues that with the digitization of phone calls (cell phones), pictures (digital cameras, still and video), the internet, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, that a lot of people are digitizing parts of their life, just not in a collective organized fashion.

Read the rest of this entry »

Between August 10th and September 1st, I did not post a single written word to this blog.  I wasn’t boycotting it, nor was I burned out from more than 100 posts to an “experiment” suggested by our public relations staff over a year ago.  I just didn’t have the time.

My time off from the blog occurred because my wife had knee replacement surgery, and I no longer had the luxury of writing a piece or two in the evenings after the evening rush hour in our house had settled down.  I gained an appreciation for the things that my wife did for us when I had to take those over too.

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this year, the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) released a publication called Boldly Sustainable: Hope and Opportunity for Higher Education in the Age of Climate Change.  Written by Peter Bardaglio, senior fellow at Second Nature, and Andrea Putnam, Director of Sustainability Financing at Second Nature, the book provides a compelling argument for colleges and universities to fully explore the opportunities and business implications of pursuing sustainable business models and integrating the topic of sustainability as a core component of student curriculums.

The book begins by outlining sustainability initiatives to date including the Kyoto Protocol and the subsequent discussions currently underway for the drafting of another version of that agreement as well as the history and efforts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) among others.  The authors contend that colleges and universities are uniquely positioned to make a significant impact in the global struggle to address climate change.  Quoting President John Adams’ statement that “’There are two types of education.  One should teach us how to make a living, and the other how to live,’” Bardaglio and Putnam argue that not only does the pursuit of sustainability in college curriculums and business practices make good financial sense, it is an imperative if institutions are to educate students for the social challenges they will certainly face upon graduation.

Read the rest of this entry »