"Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Unpacking the MOOC as Buzzword"
Love coming back to these posts or talks that rattle my cage and knock around in there for awhile. Plus, @bonstewart is awesome,
"Knowledge abundance and globalization and the push for participatory collaboration all challenge the role of the traditional classroom. The question of what an education is for is ever-contested, and in a post-industrial world, ever-complex."
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/university-venus/slouching-towards-bethlehem-unpacking-mooc-buzzword
In the article I was pointed here, for what look like two really sweet opportunities to engage in great learning conversations with colleagues and friends.
"What is role of the academy in increasing national economic competitiveness while preserving the “vital combat for lucidity” [2] that defines an open democratic society?"
Has me wondering if we're closer than we think to the disruption. Wondering if it's a disruption for good and many will thrive. Allowing large numbers of people to learn about your content is a tremendous opportunity to leverage and stack knowledge nuggets. The value in paying for the school comes from the gleaning, curating, and collecting of those nuggets which were built and vetted by previous participants. These base building nuggets begin the stacks of knowledge that the paying learners have the opportunity to build and jump off from. I see a lot of benefits to this model of co-creation over time, both synchronous and asynchronous? Should we be building our own textbooks, next?
I also would love to see higher ed institutions "adopt" sisters and brothers at the Junior college level, as the roles of those institutions could be leveraged to be models for open, online, participatory social learning environments and ideally free.
http://media-cache-ec1.pinterest.com/upload/128634133077494690_AjvxQsFh_b.jpg
http://pinterest.com/pin/128634133077494690/
