End Universities as We Know Them

For those of you in academia who think the revolution effecting everyone else won't be coming to greet you anytime soon, think again. Mark Taylor's recent Op-Ed in the Times sets forth the dirty secret of higher education. As with many industries, it is an unsustainable model that will soon meet its demise.

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

Mark goes on:

The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors. The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.

Read the Op-Ed piece and thanks Mark also visit how the university works for interesting debate on the topic.

Jim Collins - We're all Headed Into The Storm

A recent article in Inc Magazine, "How to Thrive in 2009" featured Jim Collins, author of Good to Great. His analysis of where we are all headed as organizations is poignant. Here is an excerpt on the coming wave of unforseen challenges all organizations will face:

"Most people are in the comfort of base camp, and they can go on doing what they're doing even if there is a big storm. But the people who wake up high on that mountain in a howling storm are in grave danger, like the technology people after the bubble burst. It hit me that we're all heading up there, whether we like it or not. We're heading into a world characterized by big events, big forces, massive storms. We're going to be vulnerable little specks high on the mountain when the storm hits out of nowhere. And if we're not prepared, we're going to die up there. Or we're going to be in real serious trouble.

Here are his views on a new paradigm of leadership:

"Business owners and chief executives have had a tremendous amount of concentrated power. They don't really have to lead. If I put a gun to your head, I can get you to do a lot of things. It means I have power. It doesn't mean I've led. In business, we largely have power, not leadership. In a social-sector organization, power is diffuse. So, getting things done requires the ability to truly lead. If you want to create a movement, you can't order it or demand it or will it into existence by exerting concentrated power. It just won't work." Yes leadership.

Welcome to the revolution where true vision, understanding and leadership are a requirement; not a luxury.

X-Prize: A Solution for Health Care

X-Prize recently announced they are extending their model to healthcare with a $10 million prize, intended to "catalyze dramatic improvements in health and health care value in the United States." Read the full release here. "if you can't measure it you can't change it" says the X-Prize CEO Dr.Peter Diamandis in the video below. What's the measure in health care ? That is problem in the extant health care model. The highest quality care at the best cost still entails a scarcity paradigm: at some point extending care to an individuals does not generate an ROI for the overall system. Who is going to make those choices ? The X-Prize outcome will be interesting because the solution is complicated; until consumers have an understanding on par with the system that delivers their care and until individuals are rewarded or penalized for behaviors that contribute to outcomes, the idea of "choice" is an oversimplifed solution to this complex problem.

Peter Diamandis, CEO, X-Prize Foundation from Health 2.0 on Vimeo.

Moodle - Open Source Learning - Welcome to the Cloud

The open system revolution is emerging with more and more content management systems delivering highly functional tools that deploy educational content rather easily. Moodle is one of these. Customizable, intuitive, and open; the system is used by 9 million participants in 200 countries with support for 80 languages. Design learning outcomes,  test your participants, include a variety of content and compatibility is rarely an issue. Best of all you don't have to have an IT department to deploy your educational content around the globe. Welcome to the clouds - the view is awesome from here !

Moodle Presentation from Alja Sulčič on Vimeo.

Regenerative Medicine - Organ Growth From Stem Cells Emerges

This technique will be fairly common place in the very near future. The use of stem cells to generate organs that replace existing ones is here.