rworld – 02-June-2010

I like the project oriented nature of my rwebdb posts. With this present post I start a similar project but one both more nebulous and more personal.

Several years ago when I started this blog, my focus was higher education and institutional change. That focus remains, but it’s clear that much of my reading and thinking and learning now occur in areas that I don’t write about.

It’s difficult even to categorize this learning (which doesn’t bode well for my having anything coherent to actually write about). But it concerns tectonic changes happening now in institutions everywhere. It feels simultaneously dangerous and hopeful, requiring the very best that we all can offer as the world lurches toward something different.

What I propose may feel like a diary at times, just assorted efforts to make sense of the context within which educational change is now occurring. Please excuse the personal nature of these posts. They are mostly for me, but done in public to force me to think out loud.

As a name for this project, I’ve chosen rworld. In speech this sounds like “our world.” That is the best I can do to describe what seems to be happening in the world today. We as individual people are now saying to institutions across the spectrum “many of your ways have gone seriously astray; it’s our time to imagine and build tomorrow.”