IBM back on my mind.

My father worked for IBM so this company was a part of my life for many years. But I always thought of IBM as this big faceless company that made mainframe computers. Yes I know they had been a big player in personal computing but that never stuck with me, and not them either. Then [...]

Education at what cost?

As a university graduate and university professor I am constantly struck by the number of people who should have access to higher education but don’t. There are many models of alternative education and each has its place. Shai Reshef founded University of the People in 2009 and I think this is a model that we [...]

Get Motivated!

In September I will be taking on the challenge of being the 1st chair of the Department of Mass Communication at the Canadian University of Dubai. The 1st question people ask is why am I leaving Zayed University after 12 years? Zayed University has been a great place to work and a fantastic personal innovation [...]

Innovation in Everything!

I think, I know that we all need to be thinking about innovation in everything we do. Of course we don’t or we like to say we are not innovative. The biggest failure today in pretty much every industry is failing to see the ability to innovate what we do. And education is top on [...]

Full Context Publishing

We all have a book inside of our heads, maybe you have more? The problem we are constantly faced with, as we think about the ideas and information we want to communicate, is that the ideas and the delivery vehicle have come to be separate. What we communicate and how we communicate have become so [...]

The Sound of the UAE

I have been teaching a practicum course at Zayed University in Dubai called Zayed Media Lab since 2003. This course has changed a lot since we first started it, but it has always stayed very true to the core idea of combining what has been learned in the curriculum of the communication college to real world [...]

Why We Need to Give Students a Voice

I am very lucky to be an educator who has access to the mass media as a talk show host. I can be a real pain in the neck as an educator with a voice that can reach many people through the mass media. Recently I asked myself why there isn’t any student radio on [...]

The Training We Need

I am constantly amazed by how ill prepared students really are to go out into the big bad world of work. YES we do give students a wealth of ideas and knowledge. YES we do tes the life out of students to prepare them for failure and criticism. But how well do we prepare the [...]

How Digital and Traditional Journalism Mix.

I teach in a College of Communication and Media Sciences. We teach storytelling. Some of the tools to tell stories are traditional, paper and the like. Some of the tools to tell a story are electronic. And the constant battle today is to find the mix, the right mix, of traditional and new journalism tools [...]

Communication Outside the Box

Too often when we think of communication we get caught in our our known and accepted reality, the reality trap. Communication can and does take many forms. The ability to harness a variety of forms of communication through the creative process is something we are not doing so well in our education systems. Don’t get [...]

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