A new two-year project funded by the European Union’s ERASMUS+ agency, D-Reskill@University, is an important front in the global battle between democracy and authoritarianism. The big question: will the United States of America step up to help? In early October 2022, I will be in Paris to give a talk at...
California College Students: Vote “No” on the Recall To Make Public College More Affordable and Be Sure to Ask Your Parents to Vote “No” on the recall, too! Earlier this month, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation he personally sponsored that will save California college students thousands of dollars each while...
Every Tuesday 11AM New York, 5PM Paris, 6PM Amman starting May 18, 2021, free, online, open to the global public. #IPEVLive This article was co-authored by Michel Wieviorka and Hal Plotkin On May 18, 2021, the International Panel on Exiting Violence (IPEV) will begin a series of eight live weekly online public...
President Joe Biden should create the digital equivalent of FDR’s Works Progress Administration to build durable continuously improving public digital assets, restore faith in government, and most importantly, to protect our democracy from the steady encroachment of fascist authoritarianism. President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. should create the U.S. Digital Progress Administration...
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about former California Governor Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown, Jr.’s Office of Appropriate Technology (OAT) and what might have been. Brown created the OAT, which was mothballed by his GOP successor, during his first term as California’s governor in the mid 1970's. It was the...
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was supposed to be a temporary fix. Times up. I have a confession to make. I was complicit in what may have been the biggest public policy mistake of the last century. I didn’t know it was a mistake at the time. Instead, I...
Originally published on Medium.com [caption id="" align="alignleft" width="291"] The author, age 22, circa 1979[/caption] The recent avalanche of #MeToo recollections has kicked me back in time to my salad days, more than 40 years ago, when a much older, closeted male boss asked me to perform oral sex on him. Despite its...
We have just entered a period of potentially enormous social turmoil. But like the 1960’s, this new season of social angst and struggle could also set the stage for some unexpectedly positive outcomes, this time, by transforming labor markets and business ownership structures. In fact, as 2017 starts, there are...
If you want to read the five ideas first, skip to the Five Ideas heading below. If you want to know why I wrote this, start here: The outcome of the 2016 election was politically crushing for me and for many progress-minded activists. But I also have a personal reason to...
The annual Open Education Conference, which is coming up again next month, may be the world’s fastest-growing academic meeting. Scheduled this year for early November in Richmond, Virginia, the conference will open its doors 13 years after the first such gathering was conjured into existence by then-Utah State University Assistant...
Hillary Clinton’s statement today about jobs and the economy, which she made during her first stop as the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, inadvertently gave millions of unemployed and underemployed American workers another reason to keep the race against Republican lunatic Donald Trump closer than it should be. I winced...
Earlier this week, California Governor Jerry Brown did something that will put thousands of dollars into the pockets of California community college students. The cash will arrive in the form of direct out-of-pocket savings as California joins Virginia and 38 community colleges in other states that are rolling out Zero...
Silicon Valley is buzzing today over the release of SLAVER(tm), a new iPhone app that promises to bring back slavery with greater convenience than ever before. “Our goal is to change the world,” says company co-founder Thad Techsmart, wearing his standard attire, black T-shirt, black pants, black shoes, black socks...
The Association of American Publishers, which represents college textbook publishers, just wrote an inadvertently funny letter to California Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr. By misspelling common words, including some typos, and making other factual errors the publishers have accidentally made a case for the very same quickly-fixable open educational resources (OER)...
Everyone wants to be a successful venture capitalist. That’s the conclusion I draw from written protests lodged with the U.S. Department of Education by several higher education groups to a sensible and arguably long overdue rule change proposed late last year by the Obama administration. The Obama administration’s goal, which...
At last, we have evidence of a skills gap (shoemaking)! I had to clip this ad that ran today in our local daily newspaper, the Palo Alto Post, for the edification of the D.C. and corporate policy elite who stubbornly maintain that the so-called "skills gap" is a major problem...
One of the best things about having been a member of the Obama administration was the chance it gave me to see history unfold close up. For example, I remember the night when my heroic friend Bob Shireman, then-deputy under secretary of education, sprinted back to the U.S. Department of...
We should modernize how we approach testing in our public schools and colleges. Think about flight simulators. When U.S. Navy instructors train a new pilot they would never dream of giving her the keys to a $300 million fighter jet if she gets a passing score on a bubble (multiple choice)...
In a previous post, I expressed my dismay that President Obama and Vice President Biden have allowed their administration's victory on open educational resources (OER) to go unclaimed. It's not just a matter of failing to take a bow for a significant win. The larger problem is that by ignoring...
Today's LA Times carries a major expose on President Reagan's so-called Star Wars program, which I first investigated nearly 30 years ago. The paper's conclusion: most of the $10 billion spent to date has been wasted. That is exactly what the experts I profiled predicted back in 1986. Imagine what we...
I was saddened to see President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan try to raise the Zombie Skills Gap argument from the grave again last week. I won't mince words. The claim that there are millions of open jobs that no Americans are qualified to fill is complete hogwash....
If you want to cut to the chase to see what this is all about click here. Here's the Full Monty...
New America Foundation's Lindsey Tepe is a terrific new voice in D.C. policy circles. Lindsey is a Teach for America veteran who taught fifth and sixth grade in Chicago before getting hooked up with New America's highly respected education policy group. What has me over the top, though, is her...
Here is a link to the winning three-minute short from the Why Open Education Matters video competition I helped organize during my service as a Senior Policy Advisor in the U.S. Department of Education. I'm quite proud of this video. It does a great job, as do the two runners-up...
One thing that gets me really excited is when someone demonstrates how leadership can happen in the age of the Internet. I don't know anyone who has illuminated this better than my friend, Larry Lessig. Rootstrikers is a case in point. Day after day I am blown away by Rootstrikers....
One of the best parts of the last five years was the chance I had to travel around the country and even around the world on occasion representing the Obama administration. I'd meet new people and learn new things. In most cases, I was expected to give a little speech...
It's been nearly six years since I blogged regularly. But before I can get started again, I have to do something first. Which is to thank and acknowledge my (wo)mentor, role model, friend, and collaborator, former U.S. Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanter. I worked with Martha for nearly 10...
My cousin, sociologist Jeff Weintraub, just forwarded a highly informative post, must reading, excerpting the work of his friend, Lane Kenworthy. Both deserve praise for bringing scholarly attention to a topic that often gets ignored or denied here in Silicon Valley. Perhaps some facts will help. Couldn't hurt. Here are...
www.cahealthcarecoalition.org Hospital admissions are arguably the earliest, best and fairest indicator of a local health system’s performance and the effectiveness of health plans in managing care. Here’s why: · Research shows that hospital admission rates for medical and surgical admissions vary enormously within and across cities, states and regions. For example, women...
President Obama's announcement yesterday of his community college initiative represents the most significant national leadership in the area of access to higher education in more than a generation. The proposal includes a request for a $500 million dollar investment to pay for the creation of open education courses, which will...
The following is the eulogy for Robert Kennedy given by his brother, Sen. Edward Kennedy at the public memorial service held on June 8, 1968, at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. Your Eminences, Your Excellencies, Mr. President: On behalf of Mrs. Kennedy, her children, the parents and sisters of Robert...
From the proposal: Create a New Online Skills Laboratory: Online educational software has the potential to help students learn more in less time than they would with traditional classroom instruction alone. Interactive software can tailor instruction to individual students like human tutors do, while simulations and multimedia software offer experiential learning....
Today's issue of Politico features an excellent Op-Ed by Education Secretary Arne Duncan. I'm not sure how long it will be online so I've cut and pasted it below. You can read the whole thing in its original form here. Moving college into the 21st century By: Sec. Arne Duncan October 1, 2009...
The White House blog has an exchange of letters you really must read. In the first one, business leaders used to throwing their weight around demand an end to the Obama White House policy that has banned lobbyists from serving on federal boards and commissions. In the second letter, White...
Former San Jose Mercury News editor and columnist John Fensterwald just debuted a new blog that is bound to be worth reading. John was often on the front lines of worthwhile reform efforts and is one of the most knowledgeable journalists/experts in the Bay Area on a wide variety of...
Few of us get to see our fondest dreams realized. This announcement, below, represents the culmination of years of effort by a small group of committed individuals who overcame what at times appeared to be insurmountable obstacles to push forward an idea whose time had come. The result promises to...
Excerpted from today's Washington Post (read the original article here). Education Secretary Pushes to Revise Student Loan Practices By Nick Anderson Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, February 10, 2010; A15 Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Tuesday urged the Senate to overhaul student lending, asserting that the banking industry has had "a free ride from taxpayers...
The White House and the Department of Education recently released several new documents that explain President Obama's proposal to save taxpayers roughly $80 billion dollars over the next ten years by reforming and improving the way federal student loans are made -- and how those savings will be used to...
Just learned my recent talk at the annual Big Ideas Fest is now online (and yes, I know I need to lose some weight!)...
My old friend, mentor and former colleague, Harris Mankin, passed away recently. You may have known him by another name (see the list and obit below, courtesy of Brian Rhea). Harry would have wanted his obit published far and wide. He was somebody. The world is a smaller and less...
Few things upset me more than the free pass many media outlets give to people who say things that are just not true. In many cases, these untruths often serve some larger purpose for their purveyors. Savvy CEO's, for example, have often stampeded public agencies into decisions that fatten corporate...
Jon Stewart is our modern Will Rogers. He should have a medal pinned on his chest. In this short segment, he illuminates the use of the classic guilt by association smear tactic so often employed by Fox News: ...
I'm pleased and proud to note Creative Commons recent publication of my "Free to Learn: An Open Educational Resources Policy Development Guidebook for Community College Governance Officials," which has already been linked here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here....
Excerpted from New Job-Training and Education Grants Program Launched. "Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan ushered in a new era of hope and opportunity for millions of Americans today when they revealed the innovative application criteria for the first $500 million in grants under the four-year,...
At the precise moment when government agencies should be using available technologies to lower costs and increase access to high quality educational opportunities -- at the very moment when that may well be our most pressing public need -- California is about to take a giant leap backward by ditching...
Kevin Carey, the Public Policy Director for Education Sector, an independent think tank in Washington, DC, has the best coverage yet of what I've been up to recently. Excerpt: In the late days of March 2010, Congressional negotiators dealt President Obama's community-college reform agenda what seemed like...
Visit the contest website at Why Open Education Matters.org Read the official Department of Education blog post here....
Visit the contest website at Why Open Education Matters.org Read the official Department of Education blog post here....
At the precise moment when government agencies should be using available technologies to lower costs and increase access to high quality educational opportunities -- at the very moment when that may well be our most pressing public need -- California is about to take a giant leap backward by ditching...
Kevin Carey, the Public Policy Director for Education Sector, an independent think tank in Washington, DC, has the best coverage yet of what I've been up to recently. Excerpt: In the late days of March 2010, Congressional negotiators dealt President Obama's community-college reform agenda what seemed like...
Tuesday, March 29, 2011 I'm happy to note that my upcoming talk at Google corporate headquarters in Mountain View is free and open to the public. Seats are limited, however, and you do have to register in advance to get thru the security rigmarole. Here are the details: ...
Excerpted from New Job-Training and Education Grants Program Launched. "Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan ushered in a new era of hope and opportunity for millions of Americans today when they revealed the innovative application criteria for the first $500 million in grants under the four-year,...
I'm pleased and proud to note Creative Commons recent publication of my Free to Learn: An Open Educational Resources Policy Development Guidebook for Community College Governance Officials," which has already been linked here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here....
Few things upset me more than the free pass many media outlets give to people who say things that are just not true. In many cases, these untruths often serve some larger purpose for their purveyors. Savvy CEO's, for example, have often stampeded public agencies into decisions that fatten corporate...
Jon Stewart is our modern Will Rogers. He should have a medal pinned on his chest. In this short segment, he illuminates the use of the classic guilt by association smear tactic so often employed by Fox News: ...
My old friend, mentor and former colleague, Harris Mankin, passed away recently. You may have known him by another name (see the list and obit below, courtesy of Brian Rhea). Harry would have wanted his obit published far and wide. He was somebody. The world is a smaller and less...
Excerpted from today's Washington Post (read the original article here). Education Secretary Pushes to Revise Student Loan Practices By Nick Anderson Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, February 10, 2010; A15 Education Secretary Arne Duncan...
Former San Jose Mercury News editor and columnist John Fensterwald just debuted a new blog that is bound to be worth reading. John was often on the front lines of worthwhile reform efforts and is one of the most knowledgeable journalists/experts in the Bay Area on a wide variety...
Today's issue of Politico features an excellent Op-Ed by Education Secretary Arne Duncan. I'm not sure how long it will be online so I've cut and pasted it below. You can read the whole thing in its original form here. Moving college into the 21st century ...
The Berkman Center at Harvard recently posted a nice write up on the early history of Open Education Resources and community colleges. While flattered, the review largely omits the critical role played by many other individuals who gave OER the running start at our community colleges that helped to successfully...
The White House blog has an exchange of letters you really must read. In the first one, business leaders used to throwing their weight around demand an end to the Obama White House policy that has banned lobbyists from serving on federal boards and commissions. In the second...
From the proposal: Create a New Online Skills Laboratory: Online educational software has the potential to help students learn more in less time than they would with traditional classroom instruction alone. Interactive software can tailor instruction to individual students like human tutors do, while simulations and multimedia software offer experiential learning....
The following is the eulogy for Robert Kennedy given by his brother, Sen. Edward Kennedy at the public memorial service held on June 8, 1968, at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. Your Eminences, Your Excellencies, Mr. President: On behalf of Mrs. Kennedy, her children, the parents and sisters of Robert...
President Obama's announcement yesterday of his community college initiative represents the most significant national leadership in the area of access to higher education in more than a generation. The proposal includes a request for a $500 million dollar investment to pay for the creation of open education courses, which will...
I can finally confirm some great news. I have been offered and have accepted a position in the administration of President Barack Obama as a senior policy adviser in the Department of Education. I'll be sworn in at the LBJ DOE building in DC on Monday, July 13. We'll be...
May 05, 2009 I like and respect Carl Guardino a lot. Guardino is the CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (which was formerly known as the Silicon Valley Manufacturers Group). Carl represents many of the area's leading employers. He and his group of activist CEOs have accomplished many good things...
May 11, 2009 Great news. "Heist," the documentary film project supported by ReelChanges.org about the calamity on Wall Street, co-produced by HBO vets Donald Goldmacher and Frances Causey, pulled in $30,000 today from a single donor! That makes "Heist" the most successful project in the short history of our start-up non-profit organization,...
"Heist," the new documentary film project produced by Donald Goldmacher that documents "how Wall Street pulled off the greatest theft in history," has become the single most successful ReelChanges.org documentary project so far, pulling in $5000 in just one day (yesterday). Woohoo! ReelChanges.org is a project of the Center for Media Change,...
President Obama's decision to name Foothill-De Anza Chancellor Dr. Martha Kanter to be the next Undersecretary of Education will change the course of history. Dr. Kanter's appointment was announced this morning by Education Secretary Arne Duncan and confirmed this afternoon by the White House. This may be President Obama's most...
Special thanks to CURRENT reporter Karen Everhart for her very nice write up about ReelChanges.org in the PBS trade journal's most recent issue. Karen captured both the factual details about what we are doing and the context within the world of public broadcasting, where the public is usually not invited...
CBS 60 Minutes just pulled their entire April 19th episode, which contained their controversial segment on cold fusion research, off the web sometime tonight. Curiously, at present they still feature a promo tab for the 4/19 show referencing the cold fusion report on the 60 Minutes homepage, but when clicked...
This stunning article in the most recent issue of The Atlantic reinforces what I had to say here and here and here. The author, Simon Johnson, is a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management who was the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund during 2007 and 2008. March 17,...
March 17, 2009 My oldest friends and readers will be most amused by today's column in SFGate.com (yes, my old publisher) about David Cohn's Spot.us, which is a project of our Center for Media Change, Inc. Here is my favorite part: In thinking about how to make the editorial model more "dynamic,"...
March 06, 2009 Free Textbooks at Foothill-De Anza: First Annual Report Three years ago, at my request, the Foothill-De Anza Community College District Board of Trustees enacted the first ever Policy on Public Domain Learning Materials in the country. The policy made providing support to faculty who wish to create, use, or...
March 02, 2009 This outrageous news just in from Larry Lessig: Right now, there's a bizarre proposal in Congress to forbid the government from requiring scientists who receive taxpayer funds for medical research to publish their findings openly on the Internet. This ban on "open access publishing" (which is currently required) would...
I don't usually offer professional recommendations in this space, but my dear friend, San Jose personal injury attorney Dick Alexander, is the subject of a new video that will be of interest to anyone who needs or knows anyone who needs a personal injury attorney. Dick's been my close friend...
February 26, 2009 My previous posts on the credit crisis have been getting so many hits I'll weigh in on that topic again with a brief observation and a very simple proposal. First, the observation: Most of the talking heads attribute the current credit crisis to the housing bubble, the sub-prime loan...
February 26, 2009 My previous posts on the credit crisis have been getting so many hits I'll weigh in on that topic again with a brief observation and a very simple proposal. First, the observation: Most of the talking heads attribute the current credit crisis to the housing bubble, the sub-prime loan...
February 24, 2009 We got a nice little mention in Edward Helmore's column in the Guardian today. Excerpt: Spot.Us first solicits ideas for investigative stories, then uses an approach called "crowdfunding" to send a reporter out. "We distribute the cost of hiring a journalist across a lot of different...
February 14, 2009 Crowd-funding has come to public television! I'm pleased to announce that the collaboration between our non-profit organization, the Center for Media Change, Inc. and our ReelChanges.org project, and Maryland Public Television (MPT) hits the airwaves starting on Monday. At that time, MPT will start airing the following 15-second...
It took us a day or two longer than we had hoped but I am happy to report that ReelChanges is back in business after the nasty Denial of Service (DOS) attack that shut us down on XMAS eve. I'm still trying to get to the bottom of what happened,...
December 26, 2008 Well, I guess it had to happen. Some malicious idiot picked XMAS eve to stage a DOS brute force attack on ReelChanges.org and successfully took the site down this morning. We're currently working with our ISP to restore service as quickly as possible but I have been advised...
December 19, 2008 Bernie Madoff isn't alone. In recent weeks, as the so-called "credit crisis" has unfolded, we've seen evidence of a catastrophic failure of leadership at the highest levels of our country in both government and industry. Apologists are sure to blame the usual suspects: "a few bad apples." But...
Some great news to report about something we've been working on for months. Today, we received the official word that it is okay to announce that our Center for Media Change, Inc. project, ReelChanges, has just won a highly-coveted Public Media Innovation grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in...
And while I am it there is another thing that really bothers me about the current federal government bailout of the banking sector. Financial services firms such as Citigroup are failing because their business model does not work. Now, who would have ever guessed that a business model based on charging...
November 24, 2008 As a longtime economics and financial correspondent, I am just stunned reading today's news. Totally and completely flabbergasted. November began with us watching the global financial system starting to melt down. But it is ending with what appears to be the near-total collapse of the U.S. economy itself,...
I bet I am not the only person cheering this week at the news that the nation's largest credit card company, Citibank, may soon go broke and shut down. I closed all my Citibank accounts a few months ago (I had several) after a company representative lied to me, flat...
The scariest thing about the current global economic crisis is the look of uncertainty and sometimes even panic in the eyes of many of those who are supposed to fix the problem. They clearly don't have much of a clue. So, how could we solve the credit crunch? Really, what...
November 14, 2008 My friend and colleague, Spot.US founder David Cohn, wrote an inspired blog post today about the future of journalism and our shared responsibilities as citizens. An excerpt: What we need is inspiration, hope, a belief that yes "journalism will survive the death of its institutions."...
Some good news: Arthur Nicholls' documentary project on the recent expansion of federal executive branch power is the first ReelChanges project to bring in more than $2000 in donations. Nicholls banked most of that cash in the last ten days. His success is heartening and offers some object lessons to...
September 09, 2008 Please check out and then, if you possibly can, make a generous contribution today to Melitta Tchaicovsky's fascinating and important documentary film project, "B'nai Darfur (Sons of Darfur)," now featured on ReelChanges.org. Tchaicovsky's project is really a perfect example of why we created ReelChanges. And why I hope...
August 24, 2008 Many thanks to Gale Holland at the Los Angeles Times for her story this week about our Community College Consortium for Open Education Resources, one of the fruits of the policy on public domain learning materials I worked to enact as a community college trustee. Here is a...
David Cohn's Spot.Us, is featured in a wonderful story in today's New York Times. Spot.Us is fiscally sponsored by the Center for Media Change,. Inc., the non-profit I created to get ReelChanges.org off the ground. David is really quite brilliant so it is great to see him getting this attention....
August 05, 2008 ReelChanges.org's homepage already has a full roster of high-quality documentary projects! The response has been pretty overwhelming. One thing I've discovered over the past few weeks, though, is that if I have to explain what we are doing I am usually talking to the wrong people. The right...
May 01, 2008 We launched ReelChanges.org today. I could not be more excited or more proud. It's the project I've been dropping hints about in this space for months. Given the trailblazing nature of our venture, I never knew exactly how much I should say or write about what we were doing before...
April 14, 2008 Jokerman by Bob Dylan is one of my favorite songs of all time. A good friend just passed along this wonderful version: What an incredible talent. We won't see his likes again....
March 24, 2008 I hope today's news today that Google has written a formal letter to the Federal Communications Commissions requesting permission to use so-called "white space" spectrum on an unregulated basis is the first shot in a long overdue legal fight to free our nation's airways from unnecessary, counterproductive over-regulation...
March 21, 2008 I went shopping yesterday at Fry's and online to replace my less than 2-year old Sony Vaio desktop PC after its very large and very unreliable hard drive went fully belly up, clunk, scrape, blue screen of death and all (yes, I was reasonably fully backed up, whew,...
March 18, 2008 I've been wanting to suggest this for quite some time, so here goes. Memo to bloggers everywhere, on both the Left and the Right: Please, let's all drop the misleading and unhelpful acronym "MSM" from our shared vocabularies as bloggers and use the term "Corporate-Owned News Media" or "CONM" (pronounced...
March 15, 2008 Is anyone else getting just a little bit sick of the corporate news media's relentless guilt by association smears on Senator Barack Obama? After months of pummeling him with charges that did not stick, his critics have evidently decided one way to cut him down to size is...
March 13, 2008 I just learned that Blogged.com has named my humble little outpost in the blogosphere the 10th best blog focused on higher education policy issues. Poking around, I also found out I am 12th on their list of best blogs with content related to the Democratic Party and, by...
March 04, 2008 Some of my friends recently created a new website that focuses on Senator Barack Obama's appeal to working families. In addition to trying to perform a public service, I think they also want to give the Obama campaign a new online resource they can use as the two...
March 01, 2008 I hate to sound like a Hillary basher. Really, I am not. In fact, I used to truly admire the woman. But I'm simply astonished that she has stooped to Karl Rovian fear-mongering tactics in her now desperate bid to derail the Obama juggernaut. New...
My cousin, sociologist Jeff Weintraub, just forwarded a highly informative post, must reading, excerpting the work of his friend, Lane Kenworthy. Both deserve praise for bringing scholarly attention to a topic that often gets ignored or denied here in Silicon Valley. Perhaps some facts will help. Couldn't hurt. Here are...
February 20, 2008 Today's news that Stanford University plans, at long last, to waive tuition for students from lower and middle income families is so overdue, so incredibly overdue, the appropriate response is not "right on!" but "what on earth took them so long?" Along with many others, I started pushing for...
February 14, 2008 I managed to watch a bit of today's congressional memorial service for Tom Lantos. The speakers included rock star Bono, the Secretary General of the United Nations, the Speaker of the House, the Chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and the Secretary of State, among others....
March 08, 2008 Okay, so I was wrong. I thought voters would see right through Senator Hillary Clinton's fear-mongering "kitchen-sink" tactics, and particularly that deplorable "it's 3 A.M" ad she ran, and toss her to the curb in Texas and Ohio. Instead, her tactic of literally scaring up votes still works...
I cringed yesterday as I watched Senators Obama and Clinton duke it out in Ohio over who is more anti-NAFTA. The whole thing left me wondering if the candidates realize they may be jeopardizing their ability to win California in the general election. To be sure, the stridently anti-NAFTA rhetoric...
January 25, 2008 Here is the question I submitted for the upcoming Democratic presidential debate sponsored by CNN and Politico.com: Many parents of young daughters would love to see a woman become president. But we want our daughters to know that they can do so based on their...
January 11, 2008 There's been lots of talk lately that the GOP may be heading for a possible brokered presidential nominating convention. I don't think that will happen. Instead, I suspect the GOP candidates who lose the next few primaries will have trouble raising the cash they need to compete in...
Thanks to the editors at the San Jose Mercury News for printing the Op Ed I wrote with Rich Hansen, President of the Foothill-De Anza Faculty Association, in support of Proposition 92 on the Feb. 5th California state presidential primary ballot. The op ed follows: Community college...
I did not originally support Senator Barack Obama for president primarily for one reason. I didn't think he could win. I simply did not believe, perhaps I would not let myself believe, that the same electorate that twice put the likes of George W. Bush into the White House would...
I've been thinking a lot about Junk Media lately. I even thought I might have coined the term until I learned that Ed R. Taylor, among others perhaps, got there first. Turns out there is even a JunkMedia website which, paradoxically, is the exact opposite of its moniker's connotation. Maybe that's...
December 02, 2007 This morning, ABC.com censored me! Here is what happened. ABC.com just ran this highly inflammatory story implying racism on the part of Senator Joe Biden. I commented on the story in their comments section and saw my comment published on their site and then, a few minutes later, deleted from...
November 28, 2007 From today's issue of Editor and Publisher: ...
November 09, 2007 I've learned a lot by reading Marketwatch tech columnist John C. Dvorak over the years. So I was pretty surprised to see him get it entirely wrong when it came to the recent dramatic, even historic, grilling of Yahoo's founder and CEO Jerry Yang and company General Counsel...
October 31, 2007 My voice mail service failed for some reason today, leaving me three partial messages from people whose voices I did not recognize (two female, one male). The messages cut off after a few seconds each so I could not get names or numbers and when I tried to...
October 24, 2007 After getting, I kid you not, 15 different excuses for service failures this year I finally dumped my longtime web hosting company, the reliably unreliable AIT, and moved my site to Hostgator, which came well-recommended despite its silly name. In the process of researching all this I read...
October 20, 2007 Dump Comcast. The news that Comcast is already blocking certain Internet traffic based on its content confirms that the battle to prevent a corporate takeover of the Internet is now underway. The big issue is data and network neutrality. Without data neutrality there is no Internet. Instead, what's...
October 12, 2007 I snapped this shot of my wife, Loren, with former Vice President Al Gore just a few hours before he won the Nobel Peace Prize. What a lasting disgrace that this good, decent and gifted man, who everyone agrees won the most votes in the 2000 presidential election,...
September 28, 2007 Some wonderful news: During our closing session at David Wiley's Conference at Utah State today a senior official from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation announced that ADA-compliance will be a feature of Yale University's eagerly-anticipated Open Education Pilot Project release of three full undergraduate courses in its...
September 26, 2007 These days, it often seems that the only time I can find time to update my blog is when I'm on the road. That's the case this time, anyway. Such is life with a rambunctious, engaging almost three-year old in the house. To be honest, the truth is...
1) How will the OpenCourseWare movement sustain itself over the long-term without dramatically increased participation by public sector higher education institutions in the United States? 2) If the OpenCourseWare movement has two possible paths to sustainability to consider, and one involves a deep relationship with the formal public higher education system...
March 02, 2007 Last week, our wonderfully dedicated and whip smart Silicon Valley legislator, Assemblyman Ira Ruskin, introduced Assembly Bill 577, which would establish an Open Education Resources (OER) Center for the California community colleges as a pilot project within the Foothill-De Anza Community College District. Ira is the second state...
February 27, 2007 Today's New York Times' article by Kenneth Chang on "table-top" fusion research marked a milestone. Reading it, I just had to grin from ear to ear. To be sure, the article left out a lot of important material -- and begged a few pretty significant questions it did...
February 22, 2007 League for Innovation OER Links Here is a link to the back-up material for my presentation on Open Education Resources (OER) at the League for Innovation in the Community Colleges CEO/Board Chair retreat in San Diego. These materials were prepared for a different meeting (ACCT) and cover OER policy...
February 14, 2007 Run, don't walk, get a good seat and get ready to laugh til you cry if you ever have a chance to see former Democratic National Committee Chair Terry McAuliffe speak. I had my first chance to hear him give a talk earlier this week and he was,...
February 12, 2007 By the way, if anyone is traveling to Washington, D.C. you should ask if they have finished the interior renovations before you pay a penny to stay at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel. The loud hammering in the room just above me started at 7AM. Meanwhile, the bathroom...
February 10, 2007 I'm in Washington, D.C. today, attending my first meeting as a newly appointed Associate Member of the Association of Community College Trustees' (ACCT) Public Policy Committee (whew, try typing that sometime). The organization has an important national voice on community college and overall economic development issues. There were,...
February 08, 2007 Just hours after I posted this, Purdue finally announced the results of its investigation into this matter, exonerating Dr. Taleyarkhan. On a related note, as a journalist who has covered this controversial topic I feel a personal debt of gratitude to Science magazine editor Donald Kennedy, who recently backed...
February 06, 2007 Like many others, I was intrigued when Science magazine published a controversial paper in 2002 by Dr. Rusi Taleyarkhan, then a scientist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who claimed that nuclear fusion had been achieved in a desk-top device through a process known as sonoluminescence. Taleyarkhan was...
January 31, 2007 I've admired Joe Biden for a long time. Year after year, on issue after issue, he's stood up for progressive values, inclusion and social justice. He's a smart and experienced leader. This excerpt of his recent Meet the Press interview avaliable on Youtube is a good example. I...
January 29, 2007 President Bush has repeatedly said that Democratic Party leaders and other opponents of his actions in Iraq have a responsibility to do more than just criticize his plan for a troop surge. Instead, he says, critics of his policies should offer up their own plan. Bush has a...
January 27, 2007 A new friend just turned me on to Kiva.org. Wow. The site reminds me how more and more these days we are seeing the Internet finally living up to its earliest promise and potential and roots as a tool designed to nurture more advanced forms of human cooperation...
December 27, 2005 Earlier this month, County Supervisor Jim Beall and I sent written invitations to the leadership of every public agency in our County, including cities, school districts and special districts inviting them to designate a representative to attend the initial organizing meeting of the Santa Clara County Health Benefits...
December 20, 2006 The San Jose Mercury News kindly published my op ed on Public Domain Textbooks and Community Colleges today, as follows: The Public Policy Institute of California's recent study into the shortcomings of our state's community college system highlighted some alarming data: While most students enter...
December 14, 2006 To answer that question, yes, I think Yahoo! is the next AOL. Apart from the shady bookkeeping - which AOL engaged in and Yahoo! has not - at least as far as I know, the similarities are striking. Like AOL a few years back, Yahoo! is another big name...
November 27, 2006 I guess it had to happen, but the big telephone companies and cable TV firms, which have a virtual monopoly on high-speed Internet access, have now brazenly played the race card (the race card!) in their fight against Network Neutrality. In a shamefully misleading editorial that appeared in...
October 26, 2006 Just back from co-leading sessions on Open Educational Resources and the role of community colleges at the annual meeting of the Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT) in Orlando, Florida and the League of Innovation in the Community Colleges in Charlotte, North Carolina. I'm pleased to report that...
September 30, 2006 I'm just back from the annual Open Education Conference sponsored by the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning and led by the brilliant David Wiley on the lovely and scenic campus of Utah State University in Logan, Utah. The good news is Wiley's conference once again brought together,...
September 28, 2006 Seven full years after a columnist working for SFGate.com (okay, me) first suggested it, U.C. Berkeley has finally begun broadcasting some class lectures online. My question: what on earth took them so long? Public institutions of higher education have a responsibility to do all they can to facilitate access...
September 21, 2006 This week's initial meeting of the Santa Clara County Health Benefits Coalition went quite nicely. About 35 people attended the meeting, which was held in our Foothill-De Anza Community College District board room. Present were most members of the coalition as well as a few non-members in the...
September 15, 2006 Several people have emailed with a variation on the same question: when reporters disguise their identity to get a story, aren't they "pretexting?" The answer is no. At least, not as the term has been used to describe what the investigators working for H-P did. It is not currently illegal...
September 13, 2006 The clarification offered this morning that H-P's Board Chair Patricia Dunn will not be resigning her seat on the Board of Directors at H-P but instead will merely step down as Chair - and that no other resignations or dismissals of anyone involved in the scandal have been...
September 12, 2006 As I read the news this morning about the pending resignation of H-P Board Chair Patricia Dunn I found myself feeling a bit defensive about Silicon Valley's reputation. And then I remembered the real story here. And it is not the story we've been reading about over the...
September 09, 2006 Well, it took just over 24 hours for Hewlett Packard's leadership to back off its original line of defense -- that the actions of its investigators were not "generally unlawful" under current law -- in the so-called "pretexting" scandal. HP's retreat from this indefensible and absurd position is...
September 08, 2006 In a stunning example of group think scores of my brethren in the news media have linked hands and jumped off the same cliff today. I refer, of course, to the widespread coverage of the so-called "pretexting" scandal at Hewlett Packard. Many of these stories (here is one...
August 14, 2006 Now that we have achieved sufficient participation by local agencies to get started, County Supervisor Jim Beall and I are pleased to call the first meeting of our Santa Clara County Health Benefits Coalition Steering Committee. The meeting is set for September 18 from 1:30 to 3:30 PM and...
July 22, 2006 The crisis in the Middle East is certainly dominating news coverage. In a lamentably predictable fashion, however, for the most part, the coverage adds up to little more than a tit-for-tat scorecard. There is little or no background, no context, frequent errors of fact, and, on occasion, some...
July 07, 2006 I thought about writing a long post about the importance of winning the fight to keep the Internet "content neutral" but then came across this short video that lays out the issues better than I can. On a related note, I well recall the widespread outrage generated by my...
April 12, 2006 Please join me in supporting Measure C on the June election ballot. Our locally elected Board of Trustees put the $490 million bond measure before the voters to fund a smart and much-needed long-term, 15-year plan to maintain the physical safety and competitiveness of Foothill College and De...
March 06, 2006 On February 28, 2006, Dr. Martha Kanter, the Chancellor of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District and I traveled to Sacramento to testify before the California State Assembly Committee on Higher Education about the opportunity to create free public domain textbooks. The Committee was holding an informational hearing...
February 01, 2006 Earlier this week, state Controller Steve Westly unveiled an innovative plan to make a free community college education available to every Californian. Westly announced his plan at the Community College League of California's annual Legislative Conference in Sacramento, which I attended. The plan was met with wild enthusiasm,...
January 06, 2006 The initial organizing meeting of the Santa Clara County Health Benefits Coalition took place on Friday, January 6 at the Kirsch Center on the campus of De Anza College in Cupertino. We had nearly 50 attendees representing most of the cities, school and special districts in the county...
November 14, 2005 I have to read a lot of reports, position papers and issue briefings as a college trustee. Sad to say, much of that material is not worth the paper it's written on. That's why I was so pleased to get an advance copy of UCB economics researcher Kevin...
October 13, 2004 I just received an urgent plea for help from my longtime friend Tina Redse who, among other things, is a volunteer with the What If? Foundation, a wonderful group based in Berkeley, California with operations in Haiti that feed poor children. On Wednesday, October 13 Father Jean-Juste, a Haitian...
October 13, 2005 Sorry I have been away so long. And thanks to those who have written to encourage me to get back to blogging. As some of you know, I've been distracted lately, in a quite wonderful way, by our new arrival. Even so, I was ready to start posting...
May 13, 2005 Today's announcement that Cisco Systems wants to establish a new financial market for stock options derivatives is welcome news. The move promises to help restore public confidence in Silicon Valley's battered high-tech sector. The decision is historic. It signals - at long last - a desire on the...
February 14, 2005 The Feb. 9 Health Benefits Forum was a big success. Elected officials and senior managers from more than a dozen local jurisdictions participated, including the County of Santa Clara, the cities of Palo Alto, Redwood City, Saratoga, Sunnyvale, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Santa Clara, as well as...
Earlier this month, County Supervisor Jim Beall and I sent written invitations to the leadership of every public agency in our County, including cities, school districts and special districts inviting them to designate a representative to attend the initial organizing meeting of the Santa Clara County Health Benefits Coalition, the...
February 03, 2005 I am one of the organizers of an upcoming free public forum at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills (February 9, 1-4:30PM, in Appreciation Hall) that is designed to bring local government decision-makers and health care industry experts together to explore the question of how we can keep...
December 27, 2004 An editorial in today's New York Times carries the frightening news that a federal panel is working to grease the skids to make it impossible to detect fraud in future national elections. Here is an excerpt from the editorial: "The Election Assistance Commission, a federal body...
Joi Ito's blog carries the wonderful news that the Library of Congress is working to digitize 30 million old newspaper pages and put them online for entirely free use by educators, students and anyone else interested in the history they reveal. The articles cover the period from 1836 thru 1922 and,...
Several people have asked me whether I believe the election results were valid given my longstanding opposition to the use of electronic voting machines whose results can't be independently verified. I believe in the maxim made famous by former President Ronald Reagan: trust, but verify. This is the first national election in...
Sociologist and political theorist Jeff Weintraub passes along the following timely passage from one of Thomas Jefferson's letters circa 1798 which, as Jeff notes, seems to capture the right spirit for the present moment: "A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over,...
These two charts are definately worth taking a look at. I am interested in knowing if anyone has confirmed or rebutted this information. The first is a chart comparing the exit poll results versus official results in states that used paper ballots vs. states that used unverifiable electronic voting machines. If...
The Social Sciences Research Council recently announced the formation of the National Commission on Elections and Voting to investigate electoral process controversies from the 2004 election. The announcement was made a few days before the election in response to widespread but anecdotal reports of election abnormalities. The Commission's membership includes "18...
The commotion about charges of possible election fraud has obscured one very important fact about last week's election, which is the way President George W. Bush won. He won dirty. In fact, it was the dirtiest, most divisive and unethical national campaign I have seen since, well, since his father,...
The SF-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has gathered more than 1600 names on its online petition calling for an independent test of the voting machines used in eight counties where problems were reported during the 2004 presidential election. Here is an excerpt from the EFF press release: "On...
October 23, 2004 When I wrote The Case for Paper Ballots four years ago I thought I had come up with the worst possible scenario: the misuse of outrage over the Florida voting scandal to enable the installation of an even more unreliable and unverifiable computer-based system of voting. Annalee Newitz's article...
October 19, 2004 Salon.com carries news today of another disciplinary action taken against reporters who dared exercise their constitutionally guaranteed rights to free speech and freedom of association. The latest case involves the suspension of reporters Chuck Laszewski and Rick Linsk of the Knight Ridder-owned St. Paul Pioneer Press who attended, on...
October 10, 2004 You ever get the feeling an elephant is sitting in the room and you are one of the few people who can see it? That's the experience I was having last year when community leaders and members of the faculty and staff at Silicon Valley's two community colleges, Foothill...
August 20, 2004 In politics, a debate can often turn on a good euphemism. Take the "peacekeeper missile," for example. That deft turn of phrase by President Reagan enabled a huge increase in the defense budget. Likewise, the clever choice of the words "the patriot act" to describe the Ashcroft agenda...
August 18, 2004 What do Winston Churchill, Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, Upton Sinclair, Alan Cranston, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Al Gore have in common? All of them were journalists before, and in some cases also after, they became political figures. They are among the hundreds, perhaps thousands of other important leaders who...
August 11, 2004 The news out of Iraq seems to get worse every day. To be sure, the horrific footage we see may not be giving us a full and complete picture of everything that's really happening on the ground. But even if we consider whatever good news we might be...
August 08, 2004 Welcome to my blog. This is a bit of an experiment so I ask visitors to bear with me while I get the hang of this. I've titled this blog "What I Really Want to Say" because that's what I plan to do in this space. That will be...