It is remarkable how many people with careers in community management don’t actually have a clear idea of what community is. Without a clear working definition, there is a tendency to simply do some stuff that involves some people, slap the word ‘community’ on what they’ve done, and call it…

Written in 1920, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek is most well-known for having coined the term ‘robot.’ …

One of the biggest problems with ‘digital transformation’ is that everyone use sthe term differently. At times, ‘digital transformation’ is used to describe a set of social conditions. At other times, it refers to something we have to do. Still at others (and more commonly) it is something we must…

I’m really interested in how ideas become things with the power to shape reality. My interest is not idle. It’s also not strictly academic (despite the fact that I have written a book on the subject). It comes from a desire to explode hype cycles by working with businesses to…

Our current use of AI in higher education involves automating parts (and at times the whole) of the human decision-making process. Where there is automation there is standardization. Where there are decisions, there are values. As a consequence, we can think of one of the functions of AI as the…

How should we approach the evaluation of predictive models in higher education? It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the goal of a predictive algorithm is to be as accurate as possible. But, as I have explained previously, the desire to increase the accuracy of a…

This is the second in my series on common misunderstandings about predictive analytics that hinder their adoption in higher education. Last week I talked about the language of predictive analytics. …

The greatest barrier to the widespread impact of predictive analytics in higher education is adoption. No matter how great the technology is, if people don’t use it effectively, any potential value is lost. In the early stages of predictive analytics implementations at colleges and universities, a common obstacle comes in…

In higher education, and in general, an increasing amount of attention is being paid to questions about the ethical use of data. People are working to produce principles, guidelines and ethical frameworks. This is a good thing. Despite being well-intentioned, however, most of these projects are doomed to failure. The…