Q&A with head of U. of Phoenix The University of Phoenix is usually portrayed as the devil by most traditional higher education providers, but the new president seems like a pretty normal guy. With 300,000 and 250,000 graduates, Phoenix is largest accredited private university in the country. I was surprised at how inexpensive the typical…
Category: Adult Education
Malcolm Knowles Biography
Malcolm Knowles This is a fascinating biography of Malcolm Knowles, full of personal details that add valuable context to understanding of andragogy as a theory and set of guidelines for practice. Several biographies alluded to his background in Scouting, but this was the first I remember reading about the specifics of his winning a trip…
Will Richardson on Becoming a Life-Long Learner
The New Face of Learning Will Richardson’s article in Edutopia, the publication of the George Lucas Educational Foundation, is an excellent summary of his experience with the evolution of the web from a read-only word of static pages to a web filled with blogs, wikis and podcasts. The read/write web was the major catalyst to…
A Guide for the Stubborn Intelligence
Ron Gross’s book The Independent Scholars Handbook is one of the my favorite adult education works of all time. The book, which was first published in 1982 and then re-released in 1993, contains the stories of individuals from every background whose lives contained a serious commitment to research, investigation, theory building and other intellectual enterprises….
A Competency Model for Lifelong Learning
Half an Hour: Things You Really Need to Learn One of the key objectives of our adult education course is to develop and refine our long-term competency models of what it means to be adult learners. (The best way to think of this particular class is through the principle of recursion: a group of adult…
A Noble Cause for Educators–Scratching the Itch
Abject Learning: Wikipedia and Higher Ed – Glib Answers to Tough Questions Brian Lamb has posted a great set of answers to questions about the use of Wikipedia. As Gardner points out, this is a wonderful synthesis of idealism about the promise of a connected community and the realities of our academic clutures. My favorite…
Attracting Students to Adult Education Programs
Inside Higher Ed :: Registration Rave Interesting article about the “registration rave” hosted by Morton College outside of Chicago. The college runs a 29 hour event, staffed by volunteers from the various offices of the college, where prospective students can register even if they hold down jobs that keep them from more traditional registration events….
Building Pedagogical Intelligence
Carnegie Perspectives: Building Pedagogical Intelligence It’s been eight years since I taught an (explicity) adult education course, so I’m spending quite a bit of time reviewing the literature and trying to find an appropriate framework for the class I’m teaching this fall. In the past I’ve always taught as part of a specialized graduate program,…
Even Higher Education
Back to College I generally avoid reading the AARP magazine–which I guess is the successor to Modern Maturity. As Tom Paxton wrote: So when you find it in your mailbox for the first time my friend You can tell that you getting older, you’re turning grey…. Modern Maturity, means you’re getting old When you get…
Stephen’s Back
Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ One of my student bloggers from last semester’s course wrote recently and commented on the transitions that were happening with some of the eduboggers that he had been reading regularly. Stephen Downes’ hiatus and Will Richardson’s posts on some of the issues he was wrestling with were raising…
