Critics of higher education are numerous these days. Whether it’s politicians or professors, the numbers of defenders of the status quo appear to be dwindling. Most of the books and articles that I’ve read recently have been written by current or retired professors whose audience is either higher education leadership or public policy leaders. Recently, a publisher contacted me and asked me if I would review a copy of the newly published book entitled The Five-Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating Your Child and What You Can Do About It.

Author Craig Brandon was a former journalism professor at a Northeastern party school (Keene State College in New Hampshire) as well as an education reporter. His book combines stories of his personal experiences as a professor along with complementary evidence about other institutions or the higher education industry in general. His writing is hard-hitting, designed to create an action or a reaction from the reader, depending on their point of view.

Brandon’s intro provides the overview for the theme throughout the book which is (in my words) “colleges have sold out and don’t care if students learn as long as they pay tuition.” Additionally, Brandon cites the ever increasing administrative payrolls as well as the luxury “student centers, water parks, hot tubs, workout centers, and climbing walls” as bait to attract new students. He writes that many students expect diplomas for their cash and don’t expect to have to learn.

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The first two Daniel Pink books that I read were A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future and Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working For Yourself. Free Agent Nation is about the transformation of the American workplace due to technology empowering individuals to work independently. A Whole New Mind describes the importance of utilizing the creative side (right side) of the brain for getting ahead in business. Pink is an author who observes trends, positive and negative, and links multiple sources of research that support his theory of change. Read the rest of this entry »

Approximately two years ago, I reviewed Nicholas Carr’s book, The Big Switch.  At the time, I applauded Carr’s creativity for examining the declining costs in computers, the increasing power of processing through “the cloud” and enormous server farms and his prediction that lower computing cost would enable and empower individuals, not large corporations, to create and control new businesses.  Carr wrote that the situation was not unlike the era when the cost of electricity decreased with the development of public utilities. Read the rest of this entry »

Chip and Dan Heath co-authored the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die that I reviewed on this blog in November 2008.  Chip is a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Dan is a Senior Fellow at Duke University’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE).  Their latest book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, is a theoretical and practical cookbook for individuals who are interested in making lasting changes in their companies, communities, and/or their lives.

The authors point out that for an individual to make a change, changes must be made in their environment, heart, and mind.  Unfortunately for most of us, the heart and the mind generally do not agree.  The Heaths cite more than a few psychological studies that profile the conflicts and benefits between the emotional and rational sides of our thinking.  In order to make change successful, both sides have to be satisfied.  Companies have people who are more emotional and people who are more rational.  Successful teams need to recommend solutions that meet the needs of both of those emotional/rational profiles.

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I really don’t know how I heard about David Kord Murray’s book, Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others.  It could have been recommended to me by Amazon.com or I could have read a book review of it while traveling.  Nonetheless, I found the concept intriguing enough to purchase a copy.  The book stimulated so many ideas that I could not wait to pick it up again whenever I had the chance to read a few chapters.

Murray is one of those interesting people that few of us have the chance to meet.  He was educated as an engineer, graduating from the University of Vermont in 1982, and later obtained his MBA from Pepperdine University.  Early in his career, while at McDonnell Douglas, he had the opportunity to work on the Space Shuttle program as well as the MX missile.  Later, he went into the financial services business, founding several companies and later working at Intuit as its head of innovation.

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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

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