higher education has this tripartite challenge:

1.Quickly and intelligently adapt to the new higher education learning ecology enabled by digital tools; the current curriculum, seat-time business model, credit model, and learning approaches are re-structuring far too slowly.

2.Understand the skills needed in the knowledge economy, which is itself a new ecology. In just ten years, the nature of work has changed so much that many of the personal qualities needed to succeed now have no obvious roots or antecedents in the classroom-based part of the total learning experience in undergraduate education.

3.Align learning experiences in the undergraduate years with the knowledge economy. High-impact learning experiences are the best model for change.

When you habitually view the world through the lens of a digital camera, knowing that it will take only seconds for you to transform something that has not yet happened into something that, in theory, will live forever, you inadvertently are accomplishing something else: You are altering, devaluing, the meaning of "now."

We cease paying quite so much attention to what's taking place around us, to savoring it, because we have become conditioned to believe that there is nothing that won't come around again in rerun -- probably within minutes. Knowing that the odds are slim that if we miss something we'll really miss it, we don't focus as sharply. The replay, paradoxically, seems more authentic than the original act.

At the turn of the millennium, the U.S. had some of the best broadband access in the world. It reached more homes, and at a lower price, than most every other industrial country. Ten years later the U.S. is a solid C-minus student, ranking slightly below average on nearly every metric.

Apple’s own iPad website states:

The best way to experience the web, email, photos, and videos.

That might be so, but what’s the best way to create web pages, emails, photos, and videos. That’s the device I want. That’s the device I want in the hands of my students!

I’m willing to argue that even with time and training, interactive whiteboards are an under-informed and irresponsible purchase. They do little more than reinforce a teacher-centric model of learning.

Found via Russ Goerend, http://opt.posterous.com/teacher-magazine-why-i-hate-interactive-white

Another thing the iPad makes abundantly clear is that if you want to succeed in a world ruled by a giant iPod touch, you had better develop (or acquire, or partner with someone who has) some serious multimedia chops. This device is designed to do large full-color photos, full-screen video (even HD) and much more. If all you have is a traditional newspaper-like page with a few small photos and some grainy video, you are going to get left in the dust.

That might make things easier for magazines like Conde Nast, which are used to dealing with large-format, high-quality images and which understand design. But if you’re a newspaper, let’s be honest — large, high-quality images are not exactly your thing (except for the wonderful Big Picture feature at Boston.com). Many news organizations, including the New York Times, are getting better at doing video, but most of them still have a long way to go.

As many observers have noted (including Robert X. Cringley in a recent blog post), the biggest problem that traditional media entities have right now is a cost base and production system and corporate structure that was designed for one specific platform — namely, the neo-industrial process of laying out and publishing a printed product that is delivered to people’s homes. That structure and process is completely out of whack in relation to the new platform (the web), which is growing in ways the printed version is not. And it’s not just off by a little, it’s off by orders of magnitude.

The iPad has shortcomings, but they only betray Apple's caution, just like what happened with iPhone No. 1. Now every 15-year-old kid asks for an iPhone, and the ones that don't get them get iPod Touches.

We can sit here in our geeky little dorkosphere arguing about it all day, but as much as Apple clearly enjoys our participation, the people Jobs wants to sell this to don't read our rants. They can't even understand them. My step-mother refuses to touch computers, but nowadays checks email, reads newspapers and plays Solitaire on an iPod Touch, after basically picking it up by accident one day. That's a future iPad user if I ever saw one.

If you run a big factory, of course you need control. Control over when your workers come in, what they do, what they make, what happens to your inventory, where it's sold, how it's priced, everything. More control equals more profits, at least if the market is stable.

But if your business deals in ideas, control will stifle them. If your organization deals with the public, control will inevitably alienate your best customers. When United Airlines tries to control the way customers deal with their policies, they end up with United Breaks Guitars, not profits or market share.

Worse still, a rapidly changing competitive environment means that control is a losing strategy. Record companies tried to control technology and they lost. AT&T thought they could control how people used a telephone and they lost as well.

Is there any doubt that the world is going to go faster, not slower? Any doubt that non-state actors are going to have more influence on world affairs than ever before? Any doubt that technology will continue pushing us along a slippery slope where control is not a winning strategy?

the traditional idea of the teacher may be much less valuable to the future, just like the traditional library will have much less value. We need to remove the old books that no one has opened in twenty years and put them in nearby storage. What we do need are places were people can gather — places that foster an atmosphere of intellectual expansion, where learners can pursue deeper meaning or consult specialists with access to deep knowledge resources. It’s all about people accessing networked knowledge, online, in person, and in databases. We need collective intelligence centers, and schools could be that way, too.