Big Beacon Radio

Ep. 19 -Intrinsic Motivation and Pervasive Interdisciplinarity in the Higher Education In the recent past, expert professors lectured about well established knowledge to obedient students who were expected to master the things they were told. This worked well in a workplace that demanded obedience and solutions using extant knowledge and methods. Today, we need curious, courageous students who can strike…

Ep. 18 - New Allies? What Can Liberal Arts and STEM Units Learn from Each Other From the English or anthropology seminar room to the engineering laboratory, there is a sense that times have changed. With graduates facing record unemployment and outstanding debts, it’s time to critically examine long held assumptions about both liberal and professional education, and question what an…

Ep. 17 -A Whole New Kind of Communication: Listening to Students and Talking to Crazy Colleagues Higher education can be a fairly individualistic enterprise, requiring only rudimentary forms of communication, but as education undergoes far-reaching change and transformation, administrators, faculty, and students with highly patterned communication needs must engage in unfamiliar and deeper conversations than in earlier times. In this…

Ep. 16 - Creating New Realities in Tough Situations: An Interview with Adam Kahane Recent events in France remind us of the large number of apparently intractable problems we face in today’s world. In this episode, host Dave Goldberg interviews Adam Kahane, Director of Reos Partners, and author of “Solving Tough Problems” and “Power and Love” to explore productive ways to…