Are we Netflix?

There's an interesting blog post up on Inside Higher Ed today, "5 Things Netflix Streaming Can Teach Higher Ed." It prompts us to look toward the future in considering what higher ed can and should look like, and to do that serious rethinking before, as the post puts it, someone else does it for us.

This call for broad rethinking seems to be the tenor of the discussion about higher ed these days, whether it's from philanthropic organizations like the Gates Foundation, which is encouraging designing education for the "Next Generation Learner," to Peter Smith's much-discussed book, Harnessing America's Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning.

What do you think? Are we as an institution, or even as an industry, forward-looking enough? Do you, as a faculty member, feel engaged in these discussions and able to do work that participates in moving us forward? Do you think these visions are even the correct direction for higher education to be moving?

Quick Tips to Make Your Teaching Life Easier

Are you reading the ProfHacker blog at the Chronicle? Some interesting ideas and resources there...

The recent post about Google's Rapportive tool kind of blew my mind (what do you think of it?), and as someone with WAY too much email to handle, I liked the idea in another recent post of using "best by" dating in email requests.