Disruptive Technology

Remember this picture? 

This is one precious grand. Notice I didn't yield to the temptation of alliteration and say "precious, precocious". The fact is, precious she is. And she is precocious ~ as precocious as all her generation raised on iPad, iPods, smart phones and computers. Her picture has become the icon for me of this meeting and all I am hearing.

These Executive PhD graduates from years ago are all wise enough to know that a graduate school must now educate, if not to this darling, to the people who will teach her. 

Academia has always had a publish or perish rule. Except that there has been research done that says, there are not enough prestigious journals to take all the articles that are good enough to make it in. So the universities have a goal for their professors that the professors cannot possibly meet through no fault of their own. 

To publish takes up to three years of writing, submitting, review and acceptance before publication ~ by which time the present world has moved on and the information in the article is probably obsolete. 

If you are starting with a clean slate, what kind of degree plan for graduate students in your field would you create? How would you deal with technology that is disrupting everything you have dealt with for years? What and how should we be teaching this precious, precocious generation who already know more about computers than their grandparents?