21st Century Scholar

As this blog is being published, I find it amusingly coincidental that I am traveling through some of the United States’ most earthquake-prone areas to get to the USRio+2.0 Conference: Center for Social Innovation (CSI) at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. It is a conference that is co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of State that [...]

Today’s Thursday is TechDay is a glimpse into understanding the academic utility of Facebook to support college success. Of course, Facebook’s academic liabilities are all too familiar discussion points. Yes, students login to Facebook during class and some spend hours cruising the network instead of writing that term paper that’s due tomorrow. But the prevalence [...]

In late December, Collegeology game designers Elizabeth Swensen, Sean Bouchard and I traveled to Texas  to conduct a case study at a Houston area high school. Our goal was to playtest the card game (Application Crunch) and soon-to-be launched online game (Mission: Admission) with a group of predominately African American, low-income students. We arrived right [...]

My interest in college readiness includes organizations and individual actors; therefore, the case study methodology is an appropriate research tradition. After receiving approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB), and gaining entrée and access to the respective case, the data collection begins. However, one of the first elements established for my projects is determining reciprocity: [...]

This post is a look back at the web of 2011 (dominated by Web 2.0) and a look forward to the web of 2012 (welcoming Web 3.0). If you’ve heard of Web 2.0 and aren’t sure what that means, here’s a quick refresher. The World Wide Web in its initial incarnation (retroactively dubbed Web 1.0) [...]

“Yes, we can,” exclaimed Senator Barack Obama after winning the presidential primary in South Carolina nearly four years ago. The slogan signified hope and change for a country that desperately needed it. By alluding to Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, it also hinted at a promising new future for the working class and [...]

Today’s Thursday is TechDay is a critique and a celebration. I recently attended the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) annual meeting in Charlotte and there is much to report about the role online communication technologies are (and aren’t) playing in the postsecondary research community. The critique is the obvious stuff: No wifi [...]

It is that time of year when children extort candy from nice old people. With a joy that comes with brisk clear skies, I watch my young children at this harvest ritual. My daughter is resplendent as an ice princess. My son is startling as a prematurely bearded pirate. This festival where we celebrate the [...]

The Thursday Pop There are a lot of ways that you can find a romantic interest. I knew my partner from work, but we really first talked to each other about a month after he has stopped working in the office and we were hanging out at a bar with a group of people (true [...]

The strength of the Collegeology project I mention in my 21st Century Scholar posts is intimately tied to our collaboration with Tracy Fullerton, Director of the USC Game Innovation Lab, and her game design team. Jeff Watson’s blog below describes a fascinating project that illustrates just why Tracy and her students are at the forefront of game design. –Zoe Corwin Just over [...]