Ep. 13 - Loving Your Job in the Changing World of Work The democratization of information, quality practices, and entrepreneurship has brought disruptive upheaval to many of the institutions of modern life. For increasing numbers of workers, a lifetime of work with a small number of stable employers has given way to a succession of relatively short employment, freelance, or…
Ep. 12 - How to Innovate and Collaborate Like Thomas Edison Many writers say we live in singular times calling for unusually great creativity, invention, and innovation and the rapid pace of change in the 21st century is dizzying at times, but the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries was also a time of miraculous invention and fast-paced innovation.…
Ep. 9 -The Making of a Documentary to Transform Higher Education: LET ME DO IT Transforming higher education from a culture of expertise and obedience to one that balances expertise and support is critical to unleashing courageous learners to the possibilities in the world and their lives. But the shift required is large, and transforming the master narrative of education…
Ep. 6 -Lessons from 'A Whole New Engineer' for the Transformation of Higher Education When educators think about transforming higher education they almost immediately start with modifications in content, curriculum, and pedagogy, but a recent book suggests that this approach is fundamentally flawed. Join the writing team of A Whole New Engineer: The Coming Revolution in Engineering Education, Mark Somerville…
Ep. 5 -The Future and Transformation of Higher Education Funding Since the founding of the University of Bologna in 1088, non-profit universities and colleges have dominated the landscape of higher education. With the rise of for-profit universities such as the University of Phoenix, of non-traditional non-profits such as Southern New Hampshire University, and of coding schools and other certificate schools,…
Big Beacon's latest endeavor to spread the word about transforming higher education is Big Beacon Radio, a monthly broadcast on Voice America. Listen here, or subscribe on iTunes. The first episode featuring Olin College's Rick Miller is available here.
If engineering education is going to change, then that change needs to be advocated by the students who will make up the future of engineering. Meet Athena Lin, an undergraduate engineering student at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who is doing just that. How did you first get involved with Big Beacon? Last June, I came across Dave’s writings about engineering…
The E-Word and Educational Transformation When Mark Somerville and I are were working on A Whole New Engineer: The Coming Revolution in Engineering Education one of the hardest things to acknowledge was the degree to which the transformation of education for the 21st century was profoundly emotional at the level of individuals and profoundly cultural at the level of organizations. Fairly early in our work together (2008…
Today, Kate MacArthur of the Blue Sky blog of the Chicago Tribune posted an interview with Big Beacon president Dave Goldberg. In it Goldberg was quoted as saying: What do we want today? We want the next Steve Jobs. We want young people that are courageous. We need to move from a university system that demands obedience of its young…
Jill Buck, host of Go Green Radio and founder of the Go Green Initiative will interview Mark Somerville of Olin College and me, Dave Goldberg, on Friday, 7 November at 12 noon ET (9am PT). Join us for an hourlong and wide-ranging discussion of the book, its making, and implications for the future. Here is the episode description: Go Green…