Blog

  • Continuing Education

    Some thoughts I had while reading this report about Continuing Education offerings. Now, I’ve taken a lot of CE offerings through several different sources, and I’ve even taught others how to design CE, so I have a lot of thoughts about how it can be best. I’ll close off this post with how I would…

  • Humanities Vs Business has more to do with marketing than reality

    As has been the case since before I got my BA in English and Theatre, people remain concerned about the crisis in the humanities and the shift to business instead. John Warner has a great post about this over at his blog. I wanted to look at something I find interesting with the data though,…

  • AI Hasn’t Cracked Persuasion Yet

    I spent some time today playing with ChatGPT between meetings. I figured that I should see what it could come up with when asked about job application documents. It’s idea of what a resume looks like is rooted in the resumes of yesteryear, but it’s not so bad that I’d throw it out, just guide…

  • Grade Inflation And Bullshit

    Adapted from a twitter thread. Remember back at the end of September when it came out that a university professor Chris Healy was part of the pro-fascism deadly protest in Charlottesville five years ago? Well, it’s important to connect the dots sometimes because he’s also the person who collected data on grade inflation that has…

  • Maslow’s Changes

    Based on a twitter thread Patty Krawec on twitter pointed out something that has been discussed by Indigenous education theorists and philosophers for decades even as it’s mostly been ignored by non-Indigenous educational theorists and philosophers. And she’s right. Maslow’s work is elite capture, his work before visiting the Blackfoot is so incredibly different from…

  • Indigenous Students in BC

    I was considering Indigenous student recruitment this week and I decided to check to see if we have data about where Indigenous students go to post-secondary, and because BC’s PS data system is pretty good, we do have that data. Take a look at it here. Here’s the highlights. FYI I’m using 2019 as the…

  • Employment Training and Skills Gaps

    Originally two twitter threads: thread 1 thread 2. Careering Magazine (part of CERIC) had an article by Malika Asthana (from the LMS company D2L) about The Skills-Gap Paradox. It showed a substantial disconnect from employers with the research essentially showing them saying: We worry about if we can recruit people with skills we need We…

  • PSI Strategic Plans as Government Consultation

    A former twitter thread Alex Usher over at Higher Education Strategy Associates posted in June about Strategic Actors, Strategic Planning, Strategic Hiring. I had some thoughts about it. Universities function in 10 year blocks of time. A new idea takes 2 years to become a reality, 2 more years to get working as hoped, will…

  • Alberta’s Draft Curriculum Is Built on Sandy Ground

    A former twitter thread In June 2021 Calgary Herald published an opinion piece by Dr. Martin Mrazik. It had a lot of issues, but most importantly it tipped the hand about how shaky the foundation of Alberta’s now introduced new curriculum was. “The capacity to critically think emerges from a solid foundation of well-sequenced factual…