The first pub­lic arti­cle went live at mid­night here:

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0926biz-namingrights0926.html

It’s way too late for me to write too much that’s artic­u­late, but I’ve been told that there’s a press con­fer­ence at 10:00 AM PST to announce details and that we’d all know more then. I’ve got a chat sched­uled with the folks who put the deal together tomor­row (today!) after­noon and will hope­fully post more about how this came about then.

Capella Uni­ver­sity com­mis­sioned a study recently on the value of return­ing to school. The results lend sup­port for just about every­thing we’re doing in the indus­try to fig­ure out the rapidly evolv­ing learn­ing mod­els. You can find the results site at http://www.degreesofopportunity.org. There’s also an inter­view with the head researcher on the page, Dr. Lyun­gai Mbilinyi from Uni­ver­sity of Wash­ing­ton.

Amidst all the brouhaha about qual­ity of edu­ca­tion, it appears that the num­ber of peo­ple want­ing to head back to school in a non-traditional fash­ion just keeps grow­ing, fuel­ing the fly-by-night pro­grams and extend­ing this sharks v. jets street fight between the tra­di­tion­als. We need to move past this. From the findings:

• Only one-third of those who would like more edu­ca­tion said that they would “prob­a­bly pur­sue this.â€�





• The top two bar­ri­ers to pur­su­ing higher edu­ca­tion were:





• 
  
  
  
  • Find­ing the time for school amidst work, fam­ily, and other commitments.

  
  
  

  • Find­ing the money for school, includ­ing the need to pro­vide for them­selves and their fam­ily while attend­ing school.

  
  

  
  

We need to launch a cam­paign that edu­cates on the real­i­ties of edu­ca­tion — not just the beyond-the-degree ben­e­fits. I was talk­ing with Mark Alexan­der today about other stu­dent ser­vices orga­ni­za­tions that exist specif­i­cally to sup­port the extra-curricular needs of stu­dents. This one struck me: Stu­dent Resource Ser­vices.

What genius, right? With now a full 60% of atten­dance in higher edu­ca­tion com­ing from a non-traditional age range (from the sur­vey and inter­view), it should make per­fect sense that this group begin to demand the same ser­vices they receive at work from their Employee Sup­port Orga­ni­za­tions. What are the biggest obsta­cles for col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties to get into this sort of sup­port busi­ness for their students?

On the heels of my last post, Joe Cock­rell sends me this arti­cle from the AOL Research & Learn site. It men­tions one of our stu­dents, but the sen­ti­ment is broader. Take a read — it makes me want to go to class…

And seri­ously… baby boomers are hit­ting 60 at a rate of one ever 7 sec­onds? I guess the more impor­tant ques­tion is for how long?

Career Come­back­ers — by Vicki Salemi

We have a devel­op­ment group under the Apollo Group umbrella called Apollo Pub­lish­ing. The team there has mutated over the years a num­ber of times from pub­lish­ing house to licens­ing house to dev cen­ter. Today, it serves pieces of all of those, and more. The most inter­est­ing: it’s a skunkworks for projects in edu­ca­tion tech­nol­ogy that may — or may not — make it into the class­room.

I was there yes­ter­day vis­it­ing Colin Smith, one of the devel­op­ers there work­ing on a side RSS project for me. We got to talk­ing about Sec­ond Life, one of my all-time favorite time sinks, and he intro­duced me to Sec­ond life: Sec­ond Cam­pus. It’s the Apollo Group foray into avatar based learning.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Sec­ond Life, Tech­nol­ogy, Uni­ver­sity of Phoenix

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Robert Scoble has been talk­ing about video blog­ging, and it’s got me think­ing.

As to visu­als Jon argues: “If I don’t have any visu­als, then I should stick to audio.â€� Ahh, now I’m start­ing to get his point. He’s say­ing if you don’t have any­thing visual you should just stick with audio. Well, that’s true. But, what is “visu­als.â€� Every­thing around me has a visual component.

I’ve been using audio and video in my teach­ing mate­r­ial for the last year. It’s changed the way my stu­dents inter­act with me (for the bet­ter, I hope) and I like to think we’re going to be get­ting bet­ter at deliv­er­ing it institutionally.

But I had lunch today with two of the brains of the place, Bill Berry and George Love (George says he has a blog he needs to revise, Bill should be blog­ging, and he knows it — I hope he’s suf­fi­ciently shamed at his absence from the dis­cus­sion). Our dis­cus­sion wan­dered into the realm of stan­dard­iz­ing media con­tent into the class­room. So, before I get into the meat of my point, I have to give a lit­tle background.

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So, I’m here in Las vegas. You have to get the image here. There’s a mov­ing side­walk that leads right into a fun­nel of dou­ble doors off of the A gates — the pas­sage nar­rows con­sid­er­ably, which shouldn’t be a prob­lem with nor­mal traf­fic flow. But this is not nor­mal traf­fic flow. This is post 9/11 traf­fic flow. Some­one just found some­thing ter­ri­fy­ing in the big open area on the other side of the dou­ble doors and caused a lock-down. The doors shut auto­mat­i­cally and this stream of peo­ple from the mov­ing side­walk just sort of… slammed into them. But they’re like lem­mings, these peo­ple. They didn’t adjust like fluid and move around the mov­ing side­walk to the sides, back up the hall­way. No, these peo­ple just dog-piled, let­ting their lug­gage and bod­ies just fall into one another. For five min­utes this has been hap­pen­ing and it’s not stop­ping…

___

OK, so it’s stopped, the doors are open and no one knows what it was, just that it has to do with a secu­rity breach at the Burger King.

Say it again. A secu­rity breach at the Burger King.

That’s rich.

At long last, the release of iTunes 7.0 allows Mac users to cre­ate a new iTunes library at launch a la iPhoto. Just option-click the iTunes icon to launch and get a pretty “Choose iTunes Library” window!

Tech­no­rati Tags: Apple, iTunes