Cathy Davidson

Storyboarding the Future of Higher Education.

May 162013

This is a first draft of the storyboard outline for The History and Future of Higher Education, my six-week Coursera course that will premier in Spring 2014. I will also be teaching a face-to-face Duke student-led course on the topic and the Duke PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge will be contributing ideas throughout the course to destabilize, complicate, agitate, and in otherwise shake up the centralized, Sage on the Stage video model.

Let’s Hack Higher Ed! An Invitation to Team Teach “Future of the University” in Spring 2014:

Academia, higher education Comments Off

May 102013

This is a formal invitation for anyone, at any level, to join several of us--it's becoming a small army!--in distributed team-teaching of many different kinds of classes on the future of the university, to be offered simultaneously and concurrently in Spring 2014. No formal structure. We'll communicate via HASTAC, via Twitter and Facebook, via anyone who wants to blog and reblog anything, but the purpose will be to come up with tons of new, exciting ideas (including some workarounds you are already using) for relevant, important teaching for this generation. &nb

Score Another One for Open/Blended Peer Learning!

21st century literacies, Academia Comments Off

May 042013

So exciting! Every grad student in "21st Century Literacies" turned in a chapter on time.

Peer Learning, Online Learning, MOOCs, and Me: Response to the Chronicle of Higher Education

21st century literacies, Academia Comments Off

Apr 302013

I was very surprised this morning to find myself placed right at the tippy-top of a Chronicle of Higher Education infographic on "Major Players in the MOOC Movement": "http://chronicle.com/article/Major-Players-in-the-MOOC/138817/. The whole infographic brings home how confused the world is right now about the differences and overlap between online learning, peer-to-peer networked digital learning, informal learning that uses technology to extend its reach, the use o

You Are Invited to Help Inspire and Organize the Future of Higher Education!

Academia Comments Off

Apr 272013

It's now official that I'll be teaching a six-week free, open online course on "The History and Future of Higher Education" in Spring 2014. You and your students, friends, anyone with great ideas on this topic to attend. It will be on the Coursera platform but I intend to use every one of the affordances of that platform to gather ideas, worldwide, about all the new and important and urgent ways people are learning, in formal education, informally, in communities, in person, online.

What I Hope To Learn By Teaching a MOOC on “History and Future of Higher Ed”

Academia Comments Off

Apr 212013

If I had a magic wand and could reverse the neoliberal funding trends depriving public state universities of support, of course I would.

If I had a magic wand and could make private universities affordable by the best students, not just the richest, of course I would.

Why Isn’t Everyone an Educator? Lessons for Schools and Universities from the Cleveland Clinic

Academia Comments Off

Apr 012013

Why Isn’t Everyone (and I mean everyone) an Educator?

How To Use Multiple Choice Testing As a Learning (not Assessment) Tool

Academia Comments Off

Mar 302013

For my proposed Coursera course on the History and Future of Higher Education--intended for high school and college teachers, students, parents, and students themselves--I am designing every segment not only to give history and analysis of the forms of education we have inherited from the Industrial Age that invented so many of them, I also plan to pass on concrete advice I've gleaned from the thousands of t

Does a 17 Year Old Think Like a CEO? Let’s Find Out!

21st century literacies, higher education Comments Off

Mar 242013

This week I had the incredible experience of attending an intensive workshop with 80 of the world's most powerful CEOs and CIOs and President Bill Clinton too. At this private conference, where no media was present and all were invited to speak with candor, there were several informal presentations and then two or three formal ones. I gave one of those, on attention, learning, and decision-makin

Kids Today Know Nothing: Blame New Technologies For That

21st century literacies Comments Off

Mar 202013

“The discovery of the [this new technology] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves . . . You give your disciplines not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.”

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