I just came back from the #cali2012 conference in sunny San Diego where i gave an admittedly rambling talk about the future of education as seen through the lens of open learning. I rerecorded the talk when i got home, and will post the video of the talk from San Diego when i comes available. It was an attempt at pulling together all the things i’ve been talking about for the last two years into one talk… I’ll let you judge whether it was too much 🙂
The argument goes pretty much like this.
1. Our historical ideas of education were formed when the ‘goal’ of education was more clearly understood.
2. The new tools are challenging our conceptions of education further
3. Two trends – analytics and MOOCs present an interesting landscape on which to have that discussion
4. The combination of the two presents an innovative new business model, not a new learning model
5. We need to decide why we are teaching before we can decide how to adapt the technologies
6. Simple learning is foundational, complex learning allows for decision making
7. Rhizomatic learning is a good way to prepare people for the uncertainty of decision making
[youtube_sc url=ifNs-KF47ig width=550]
note: The dead-head sticker reference is to the Udacity/Pearson connection not only changes the business model of ALL of education, it makes false claims to ‘educational’ innovation. While i certainly am impressed with the business innovation involved in this (truth be told, in a weird coming together of the planets, i predicted it at the end of last year) it is not innovative education. It is premised in the idea of taking content and shoving it into someone else’s brain.
post-script: I think i’ve pushed these ideas out as far as I can… and am feeling a bit unsure about some of what’s in here. Time to stop pushing the limits and focus on clearing up individual points of the argument i think.
Thank you! I’d despaired of anyone pointing this out. Udacity/Coursera is just Fathom 2.0 but you pay at a different stage.
Ah, you got here before me and Mr Kernohan kindly pointed me at your post. Yes to all of the above, I was trying to single out what is interesting about MOOCs in my post, as I think the new model confuses the point of them. And before you know it we’ll have supported MOOCs with accreditation where you pay a one-off study fee. Oh wait, we do that already.
But you lose points for referencing a Don Henley song – if it’s sell out lyrics you wanted you could have gone for the Clash’s ‘he who ****s nuns will later join the church’ 🙂
Excellent. THE PAINPOINT will be getting C-Suites to require/incent HR departments to be more discerning than to just look for 4 year degrees. In publicly traded companies some trade association rises up with a sticker or seal of approval that says: Mr|Ms stock holder, it makes sens to invest your dollars here because we don’t hire like it is still 1970. Mr|Ms employee candidate, you should work for us because we don’t hire like it is still 1970. And then of course the federal government will say: we don’t hire like it is still 1990.;-)
Excellent analogy. This stuff is bothering me too in a serious way. It’s not only not innovation, but it plays into some very bad ideas, not just pedagogically but in terms of broader educational reforms.