Intellectual Entrepreneurship: An Authentic Foundation for Higher Education Reform

The "blurb" we wrote for this Planning for Higher Education article says "Our relationship with the traditions and purpose of a humanistic education, it appears, are at odds with the career environment most students inhabit after graduation." The authors, Gary D. Beckman and Richard A. Chewitz, provide case studies of innovative entrepreneurship initiatives at the University of Texas, Austin, as well as background and discussion of the concept of "entrepreneurship education" in academic programming. "From our perspective, entrepreneurship—broadly conceived—is an intrinsic human right to change the status quo, and intellectual entrepreneurship is a philosophy and pedagogy to exercise this act by educating citizen-scholars—agents of change who own, are accountable for, and put their knowledge to work for the betterment of themselves and society. As we collaborate in the development of campuswide efforts to bring entrepreneurial thinking to the arts and sciences, we have the opportunity to envision entrepreneurship education in an authentic manner that is sustainable across campus, relevant to communities, and, most importantly, empowering to stakeholders."

The Kindle Factor

An early Kindle adopter, who is also using the Kindle to save students text book money and integrating into his pedagogy, lays out some of the things he's learned, and some of the considerations those who want to move in that direction need to think about.

"One of the benefits of the Kindle is that learners can replace expensive textbooks with digital books in a format read by the Kindle. For example, for a Knowledge Organizations course I will lead in the Fall, one hardcover textbook, Organizations as Knowledge Systems (2004, Tsoukas, H. & Mylonopoulos, Eds.) currently costs $89.95 at retail, $71.97 from Amazon.com, and $63.96 in its Kindle version. That’s a 28.9% savings over the retail cost of the book. Another textbook, Theory U (2009, Scharmer, C. O.), in paper, currently costs $28.95 at retail, $26.05 from Amazon, and $15.92 in its Kindle version.

The sum of those savings would be $39.02, or a 32.9% savings over retail for both books."

Read the full article here:
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/06/15/crowell

Why Professor Johnny Can't Read: Understanding the Net Generation's Texts

From Mark Mabrito and Tebecca Medley, in innovate: journal of online education, comes this more academic and thoughtful version of the cyclic news item about how differently some of the youngsters are communicating:

One way of better understanding Net-Generation learners is to examine the texts they create on online social networking, blogging, and image sites as well as in virtual worlds. Mark Mabrito and Rebecca Medley explore the nature of Net-Generation texts as a reflection of the cognitive differences between this generation's students and their older instructors, discuss the unique challenges this group of learners may present for instructors who do not share their technological immersion, and suggest the means by which such challenges may be overcome. To accommodate the needs of the Net Generation, Mabrito and Medley suggest that faculty must reconsider traditional pedagogy and integrate more innovative ways of instruction for this significantly different population of students.