I am an inveterate collector of quotations from books and newspaper/magazine articles, accumulated in two quite thick journals I’ve been keeping for the past 15 or so years. The quotes I pull from my readings are not always the author’s…
Writing on the Wall
I am an inveterate collector of quotes, now on my second thick journal full of passages I’ve gleaned from books, newspapers, magazine articles, and conversations. The quote journals are fun to reread occasionally, as the phrases and sentences I’ve selected…
Arizona State University Experiences Education
I spent a couple of days at Arizona State University in Tempe a few weeks ago, working with faculty and staff on experiential education. It’s an interesting institution, committed on the one hand to an extensive curriculum of online degrees,…
Culture Change
Universities are funny organisms, self-describing with language like “innovative” and “cutting edge,” but in practice being quite conservative in maintaining their internal status quo. Curriculum is particularly slow to change, with faculty perpetuating the style and content of their own…
Mission to Learn
I fell into a fascinating website the other day, Stanford 2025 (http://www.stanford2025.com/#intro), describing a design team exercise to imagine what Stanford University might look like in 2025. The designers worked with hundreds of students, faculty and staff, asking groups to…
A Long Farewell
A moment took me by surprise this afternoon, although I should have expected it. I am no longer the Director of SFU’s Semester in Dialogue. After 12 years, it was time to pass the torch. I’ve known this was coming…
Teaching More, or Teaching Better?
A cranky column by Margaret Wente appeared in the Globe and Mail last week, complaining that professors don’t teach enough. It blended a few sketchy statistics together with a warmed-over discussion of teaching loads, an issue that has been around the block…
Leonard Radinsky
Leonard Radinsky It was a fossil skull and some latex that provided my first exposure to experiential learning in school, in which information and experience merge into creative ideas, values are probed and transformed, character molded, and motivation to…
Experience your education
I was a seriously underperforming undergraduate student at Boston University in 1970, bored by classes and distracted by, well, all the things that distract a young man of 20. But I needed a summer job, and as a Biology major…