Stephen Downes

With no sense of context at all, Alex Usher spends a good part of this post trashing Canada's limited participation in a "higher education fantasyland" NAFSA conference on international education held in Florida (yes, the 'F' stands for 'foreign' - that's part of the context). Representation from Africa was not present - they're not really welcome in the U.S. any more. Canadians (Usher excepted) are less keen on travel to the U.S. these days, for some very good reasons. And the whole concept of international education has changed over the last few years (Canada, for example, has more demand than it can meet, and has scaled back international student numbers a lot recently). But mostly, there's no real desire in Canada to, shall we say, integrate with U.S.-based initiatives these days, educational or otherwise. The only real surprise here is that Usher considers Canada's limited participation to be a problem.