A lot of ed tech marketers are really bad. They are probably not bad at their ‘jobs’ — they may or may not be bad at generating leads, creating well-designed sales material, creating brand visibility. But they are bad for higher education and student success. Bad ed tech marketers are noisy. They use the same…
Continue ReadingAuthor: Timothy Harfield
The Politics of Oversharing: The Circle by Dave Eggers
The Circle by Dave Eggers tells the story of a young woman working to navigate a fictional google-type corporation with its sights set on achieving universal surveillance. What the company hopes to achieve is a panopticon vision of society in which no one has any secrets from anyone else. Everything that everyone does is recorded,…
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Five strategies for succeeding with data in higher education
What important steps can you take to increase the success of your analytics project on campus? At the 2017 Blackboard Analytics Symposium, A. Michael Berman, VP for Technology & Innovation at CSU Channel Islands and Chief Innovation Officer for California State University, took a different approach to answering this question. Instead of asking about success,…
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3 strategies for dealing with public speaking anxiety: Lessons from a pro athlete
Fans often ask my wife, pro equestrian Elisa Wallace, if she still gets nervous. Her answer is always: yes. Even at the highest levels of equestrian competition, it is not uncommon for athletes to involuntarily evacuate the contents of their stomach before an event. With pressure coming from large numbers of spectators (in person and…
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Ethics and Predictive Analytics in Higher Education
In March 2017, Manuela Ekowo and Iris Palmer co-authored a report for New America that offered five guiding practices for the ethical use of predictive analytics in higher education. This kind of work is really important. It acknowledges that, to the extent that analytics in higher education is meant to have an impact on human behavior, it…
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Three business lessons I learned from my father
My father is retiring today. My father is leaving his working life as I feel that mine is getting started. It seems fitting, then, to use may father’s retirement as an occasion to look back at the lessons he has taught me over the years, and that continue to shape how I approach business and…
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What is product marketing? A kind of manifesto
There is remarkably little written about product marketing. For the last month, I have been tracking the terms “Product Marketing” and “Product Marketer” using Google alerts. In that time, except for a few exceptions, all I have see are job advertisements. A LOT of job advertisements. For a position that is in such high demand,…
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