Don't Go Back to School: How to Fuel the Internal Engine of Lifelong Learning by Maria Popova “When you step away from the prepackaged structure of traditional education, you’ll discover that there are many more ways to learn outside school than within.” “The present education system is the trampling of the herd,” legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright lamented in 1956. Half a century later, I started Brain Pickings in large part out of frustration and disappointment with my trampling experience of our culturally fetishized “Ivy League education.” I found myself intellectually and creatively unstimulated by the industrialized model of the large lecture hall, the PowerPoint presentations, the standardized tests assessing my rote memorization of facts rather than my ability to transmute that factual knowledge into a pattern-recognition mechanism that connects different disciplines to cultivate wisdom about how the world works and a moral lens on how it should work. People who forgo school build their own infrastructures. I learned how to teach myself.
Harvard hates you (and Coursera isn’t all that fond of you either). Anybody familiar with my fondness for labor history, 19th century American folklore and sarcasm will understand why this is now my favorite tweet ever: If you don’t know who “John Henry” was, The Boss will be delighted to sing you one version of the story. Or better yet, read the book by Scott Reynolds Nelson and learn a little bit about all of them. My response to that tweet was so pathetic in its attempt at similar humor that I just deleted it before writing this. You think I’m kidding? [William] Bowen spent much of the seventies and eighties as the president of Princeton, after which he joined the Mellon Foundation. As I mentioned before , I know Bill Bowen (even though I haven’t seen him in many years). I think they do. Exhibit A: After the speech I gave in Connecticut last Friday, a Harvard Ph.D. in the audience slipped me an article. Exhibit B comes from former Harvard dean Harry Lewis (who talked to that New Yorker reporter, but was not quoted extensively). Like this:
Toward a Permeable, Interconnected Higher Education System | Cathy Sandeen In my former role as a dean at the University of California Los Angeles, I helped thousands of typical American college students gain the knowledge and skills needed to become informed, engaged citizens and progress in their chosen careers. But as the dean of UCLA Extension, these "typical" students were a diverse group of nontraditional learners searching for ways to earn postsecondary degrees and credentials, often while juggling family responsibilities and jobs that meant frequent stops and re-starts for their postsecondary experience -- very different from the first-time college students attending UCLA straight out of high school but representative of the current face of American higher education. We strived mightily at UCLA to help nontraditional students achieve their goals, whether it was to enter and complete a bachelor's degree program after many previous attempts to gain a degree or to earn a specialized certificate or credential needed for career advancement.
Clay Christensen takes closer look at how online learning will disrupt K-12 education When you first hear disruptive economics guru Clayton Christensen’s prediction that by 2019 half of all K-12 classes will be taught online, it’s easy to wonder if brick-and-mortar schools as we know them are on their way out. But a new study released Thursday from his think tank, the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, depicts a future of education, particularly at the elementary school level, that isn’t nearly as stark as that. The paper, which refines theories on blended learning Christensen and his colleagues have laid out in the book “Disrupting Class” and other studies, introduces the idea of hybrid innovation. Often, the researchers argue, sectors experiencing disruption go through an extended phase in which old and new technology exist side by side, providing “the best of both worlds.” “For the first time, it gave us a much clearer idea of what people in education could or could not do to bring about this future,” he said.
Degree of Freedom - The One Year BA What is ConnectED? Ed. note: To highlight the importance of connected classrooms, the White House held a virtual "show and tell" with three schools that are embracing technology and digital learning. Watch the full hangout at wh.gov/show-and-tell. President Barack Obama and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, right, talk with students while visiting a classroom at the Yeadon Regional Head Start Center in Yeadon, Pa., Nov. 8, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza) Preparing America’s students with the skills they need to get good jobs and compete with countries around the world relies increasingly on interactive, individualized learning experiences driven by new technology. But today, millions of students lack access to the high-speed broadband internet that supports this sort of learning technology. The fact is, schools without internet access put our students at a disadvantage. Here’s how ConnectED works: Upgrading connectivity Training teachers
Open online courses – an avalanche that might just get stopped These days there are plenty of prophets preaching hi-tech and digital solutions to the problems of expanding access to knowledge and higher education. Barely a week goes by without some new hymn to education technology, open-source software or open-access publishing. In the US, the growing chorus for online education through massive open online courses, or moocs, has been deafening. Across the Atlantic, the debate about online courses and their potential to restructure higher education has been raging for some time. Historically, the University of California has often proved a weathervane for global trends in higher education. And yet when a Californian senator outlined a bill that would allow students in the state to take online classes from a private provider for credit, it unleashed a storm of criticism. Those who teach in California's system of higher education are not luddites. This might just be one avalanche that gets stopped – events in California may well be the test of that.
Forty public universities will offer free online courses with full credit starting this spring Forty public universities, including Arizona State, Cleveland State, and the University of Arkansas, are planning to offer free online courses that carry full credit in an effort to entice potential students to sign up for a full degree program. The new initiative, know as MOOC2Degree (MOOC stands for massive open online course), is being run in a partnership between the universities and Academic Partnerships, a commercial company that helps universities move their courses online. As part of this initiative, Academic Partnerships will work with the universities to recruit for these courses and will receive a cut of any tuition from students who sign on for further study. The universities and Academic Partnerships are hoping that this freebie will help people realize the value of an online education without any initial financial risk.
Automated Teaching Machine: A Graphic Introduction to the End of Human Teachers (Image: Arthur King)"The machine lasts indefinitely. It gets no wrinkles, no arthritis, no hardening of the arteries . . . Two machines replace 114 men that take no coffee breaks, no sick leaves, no vacations with pay," proclaims the watch-twirling, hard-hearted CEO Wallace V. Whipple in a particularly prescient 1964 episode of The Twilight Zone. Despite the emotional pleas of the workers and their union, Whipple robo-sources 250,000 factory jobs to the "X109B14 modified, transistorized, totally automated machine." The machine - a cardboard prop filled with vacuum tubes, twirling doo-dads and feverishly blinking diodes may be hilariously outdated, laughable even. Mr. Nowhere has Mr. Now, it's time to see the next phase in the corporate takeover of public education - automation. Needless to say, Mr.
I’m having a blogsistential crisis! I am a blogger. And I am an academic. But am I an academic blogger? Lynne Murphy‘s blog began life as a ‘limbering up exercise’ before she wrote work for peer-review. A somewhat accidental academic blogger, she notes that her online presence has become part of her professional profile… even if it occassionally serves as a distraction. Lynne also questions whether she is working for the University when she blogs, but doubts a future model of higher education that involves timetabling blog time for academics. I’m not sure that I would have agreed to write a post for the LSE Impact blog if I had known that it would send me into the depths of a blogsistential crisis. But here I am: I am a blogger. I am a successful blogger, even. Before I address or sidestep these questions, let me introduce myself. The blog is a success – I’m not going to be particularly modest about that because I do get a kick out of it. I love both of those kinds of blogs -but mine is neither. What I blog is educational, though. I am an academic. I would hope that there could be (is?)
Users grade free online courses Many educators haven’t figured out what to make of free online classes for the masses, but Silicon Valley developers and students are starting to. At least three sites have started in recent months to let users of massive open online courses review the MOOCs they’ve taken. The idea isn't new, of course. Rate My Professors has allowed anonymous reviews of professors for years, frequently to the ire of faculty. But now developers are starting sites just for people who are taking MOOCs and other online offerings. Emerson Malca, the 25-year-old founder of Grade My Course, calls his site “Yelp for education.” That leads to kinder, more constructive comments, he said. Jesse Spaulding, who started Course Talk, sees a similar pattern in the reviews on his site. Spaulding also thinks some professors suggest students visit his site. Both developers said their sites help would-be MOOC students size up classes before they take them. So far, though, there are not many MOOCs with poor ratings.