Wild Cats

I attended a Davidson College alumni event last night and got to hear the new President of the college, Carol Quillen, speak. The event was at the Zoo, after hours, in the dark, and the external power was out, so there certainly was an "effect," going on. I've heard many "new" Presidents speak over the years and I have never been more impressed with an academic leader as much as I was last night with Dr. Quillen.  And I have met many.

Her articulate vision of what makes Davidson College excellent, and what they need to do to both preserve this excellence and become the absolute leader in quality liberal arts education in the digital age was at the very least intensely inspiring.

During the Q&A she spoke to the students' reaction to the Chick-Fil-A nastiness, the abusive Amendment 1 in North Carolina, commitments to diversity, and advanced education design—structurally, philosophically, programmatically, and digitally. I came away in awe of this women who has taken passion and crazy super smart and applied to into action and a plan for transformation while retaining the essence of Davidson. I only wish I were going through Davidson now. I think while hiding so far in the closet, which was absolutely necessary for my survival at the time, that unfortunately meant I had to hide from many of the opportunities Davidson had to offer even then.

I spoke to her a little afterwards and listened in on her talks regarding adaptive learning/teaching programs which are so different from the software I encountered during my MLIS which were more focused on distance learning delivery than actual teaching or learning. Oddly enough, when reading my digital magazines this morning I came across two related stories. One on the rise and fall of Blackboard as the dominate player in the edtech market. Personally as a user, I hated the Blackboard system. Hated it.

Driven and created by Professors, Coursera is the new emergent leader in education technology, not only designing learning systems for their own students, but making available some of the best courses in the world available online for free.

And how the Minnesota legislature could really use it themselves as they appear to be a bunch of frakking morons, banning delivery of MIT, Harvard and other courses online because they aren't in Minnesota (and paying them hundreds of thousands of dollars in registration fees).

Someone needs a lesson.