J Black's Library tagged edupunks → View Popular

11 Oct 09

When you put materials online, they're different in that particular way; you can pay to produce them once and they can be used by an infinite number of people. That seemed to be somewhere between terribly fascinating and the kind of realization that it makes sense to spend the rest of your life working on."
"Why is it that my kid can't take robotics at Carnegie Mellon, linear algebra at MIT, law at Stanford? And why can't we put 130 of those together and make it a degree?" Wiley asks. "There are all these kinds of innovations waiting to happen. A sufficient infrastructure of freely available content is step one in a much longer endgame that transforms everything we know about higher education."
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- online public charter high school that draws on open courseware, letting Utah students complete their degree from home. He is "chief openness officer" at a for-profit startup, Flat World Knowledge, that commissions professors to write open-source textbooks that are free online, $19.95 for a download, or $29.95 for a print-on-demand copy. (Flat World closed $8 million in VC funding earlier this spring.)
- Peer2Peer University

What WGU is doing is using the Internet to disaggregate the various functions of teaching: the "sage on the stage" conveyor of information, the cheerleader and helpmate, and the evaluator.
surveys both graduates and their employers to find out if they are lacking in any competencies so they can continue to fine-tune their programs.
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- Universitas doesn't mean campus, or class, or a particular body of knowledge; it means the guild, the group of people united in scholarship.
- scarcity of knowledge to unimaginable abundance

"The Internet disrupts any industry whose core product can be reduced to ones and zeros," says Jose Ferreira, founder and CEO of education startup Knewton. Education, he says, "is the biggest virgin forest out there."
erreira is among a loose-knit band of education 2.0 architects sharpening their saws for that forest.
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- "The advent of the Web brings the ability to disseminate high-quality materials at almost no cost, leveling the playing field," says Cathy Casserly, a senior partner at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, who in her former role at the Hewlett Foundation provided seed funding for MIT's project. "We're changing the culture of how we think about knowledge and how it should be shared and who are the owners of knowledge."
- MIT's courseware may be free, yet an MIT degree still costs upward of $189,000.
- "edupunk" to describe the growing movement toward high-tech do-it-yourself education. "Edupunk," he tells me in the opening notes of his first email, "is about the utter irresponsibility and lethargy of educational institutions and the means by which they are financially cannibalizing their own mission."
- educational remix.
- The architects of education 2.0 predict that traditional universities that cling to the string-quartet model will find themselves on the wrong side of history, alongside newspaper chains and record stores.