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 [...]

This is the first of a two-part blog where I discuss the use of social media in research and practice. Today’s blog emphasizes methodological concerns. Next week, I will discuss social media in schools. As regular readers of the blog know, I am conducting an ethnography that focuses on the lives of 17- and 18-year-old [...]

Recently, a friend asked us for a loan. This is someone we have known for a long time and because of the vagaries of the stock market and a downturn in the economy he has seen his savings diminish at the same time as he lost his job. The prospects in this economy for a [...]

I have refrained from writing or speaking about the events at Penn State because I needed time to process what we might learn from such a tragedy. When the events were unfolding a bunch of reporters called me for a quick quote and I declined saying anything in large part because there was too much [...]

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 [...]

The Thursday Pop One of my favorite quotes from the reality prison show Lockup on MSNBC is from an inmate who said: “We control everything but the gates.” I thought that was a powerful quote because this inmate really did believe (or at least wanted the viewer to believe) that he had an immense power [...]

Andrew Rosen has penned Change.edu: Rebooting for the New Talent Economy which in some respects is a typical text that talks about the need for new kinds of postsecondary institutions. It’s a breezy easy-to-read book and for those who are not in higher ed there’s nothing wrong with reading it to learn about the changes [...]

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: [...]

The Thursday Pop When I started out with this blog column in January, it was a lot of fun. I critiqued an MTV contest on the best new financial aid/college access idea and wrote about Lady Gaga. Later entries mentioned the Wu-Tang Clan method of understanding financial aid offers. I’m telling you, writing this blog was [...]