Posts Tagged: Alan R. Earls

How NE Higher Ed Helped Build Radio Free Boston (Book Review)

Radio Free Boston: The Rise and Fall of WBCN; Carter Alan (with foreword by Steven Tyler); Northeastern University Press; 2013; $25.95 Paperback; $19.99 Ebook Love it or hate it, modern radio entertainment is a child or at least a stepchild of Boston-based radio station WBCN when it was in its hippest prime, from the late 1960s and well into the 1990s. Running through this fascinating and we...

Looking Backwards (Book Review)

Liberal Education for a Land of Colleges: Yale’s Reports of 1828; David B. Potts; Palgrave MacMillan; 2010. Liberal Education for a Land of Colleges: Yale’s Reports of 1828, is, in a sense, three small books under one cover. David Potts, an academic residing in the Pacific Northwest, was originally introduced to the documents more than 40 years ago as part of a graduate-level study of the h...

Physical Plant: A Review of Architecture and Academe: College Buildings in New England Before 1860

Architecture and Academe: College Buildings in New England Before 1860; Bryant F. Tolles Jr.; University Press of New England, 2011 It’s not the topic that New England’s higher education institutions generally boast about, but for many it is their most obvious attribute—the brick, stone, mullioned, porticoed and columned facades that helped set the standard for what much of coll...

New Amendment: Quality Ed as a Constitutional Right (Book Review)

Quality Education as a Constitutional Right: Creating a Grassroots Movement to Transform Public Schools; Theresa Perry, Robert Moses, Lisa Delpit, Ernesto Cortes Jr., Joan T. Wynne, editors; Beacon Press Books; 2010; Paperback $16 Quality Education as a Constitutional Right offers a provocative look at the continued disconnect between the rhetoric of reform and the facts of the real world. Stat...

Review of MacroWikinomics (Books)

Book Review MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World; Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams; Portfolio/Penguin 2010; $27.95 Reviewed by Alan R. Earls. In a recent check of Google search term rankings, the term “wiki” garnered more than 100 million inquires over the prior 30 days. Presumably, some portion of that traffic was generated by those seeking for MacroWikinomics or its...

Book Review: Edupunks Chart Coming Transformation of Higher Ed

DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, Anya Kamenetz, Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, Vt., 2010Anya Kamenetz, a 2002 graduate of Yale and staff writer for Fast Company, could be an academic's worst nightmare. Articulate, forceful and skilled—her writing lobs volleys of criticisms that are hard to refute and harder still to ignore. In ...

Book Review: Harnessing America’s Wasted Talent

Harnessing America's Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning, Peter Smith, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2010In 1970, I was a high school student in a suburban New England town. The invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State had brought spectacular illumination to the end of the academic year and dimmed hopes that the war in Vietnam would soon be over. But optimism and idealism left over ...

Extending (Books)

The Gates Unbarred: A History of University Extension at Harvard, 1910-2009; Michael Shinagel; Harvard University Extension Monograph, Puritan Press, Hollis, N.H., 2009; $14.95 Reviewed by Alan R. Earls, a Boston-area writer who earned a graduate certificate through Harvard Extension. The old saying, attributed variously to John F. Kennedy and Count Ciano, that success has many fathers might...