The Campus Tsunami
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“In a blended online world, a local professor could select not only the reading material, but do so from an array of different lecturers, who would provide different perspectives from around the world. The local professor would do more tutoring and conversing and less lecturing. Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School notes it will be easier to break academic silos, combining calculus and chemistry lectures or literature and history presentations in a single course.”
See on www.nytimes.com
(via @hjarche)
Hyperculture: The Human Cost of Speed, SBertman, 1998
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“In a fast-moving world, it is perspective, more than anything else, that a person and a society needs — the perspective that lets one distinguish the significant from the trivial, the enduring from the transient, the true from the false. Such perspective is at the very heart of what it means to be truly informed, and being truly informed is at the very heart of democracy. As Thomas Jefferson long ago warned: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
[p. 132]
See on www.bookdepository.co.uk
Hyperculture: The Human Cost of Speed, SBertman, 1998
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“Some would argue that covering more ground exposes the speeding driver to more of what is real. But, ironically, the faster we go, the less we truly see. Speed insulates us from organic detail, and space becomes not homes, neighborhoods, and individual lives, but a disembodied medium through which we move. Though more is seen, less is observed, for the depth of our understanding is inversely proportionate to our velocity. Life itself in turn becomes one big “commute,” devoid of that density that only caring and commitment can yield. Indeed, we become so inured to motion that our greatest stresses occur when our movement is impeded against our will — by a long check-out line, a traffic jam, a delayed flight — each a blunted by-product of society’s quest for speed. Meanwhile, those who love to live in the fast lane curse the impediments in their path, never realizing that those impediments would never have existed if only they had chosen a lower speed.”
[pp. 107-8]
See on www.bookdepository.co.uk
Interview: Author Michael B. Horn Talks About The Future of Universities | WiredAcademic
Via Scoop.it – More … or less!
“WA – What happens to state schools, which enroll a bulk of students? What should they be doing?
MH – My guess is that many of the flagship universities in states will be fine. There is a good reason to have a good research base in a regional place. Schools do many good things for students in the community. They will be OK. The next tier of state institutions … it will be a much more significant issue for them that I am worried about. My advice would be to pick a strategy and focus… don’t try to be all things to all people. Really try to carve out an important niche for yourself that will be defensible and add value in the future. I do think it will be tough. For so long, the strategy of universities has been to try to emulate Harvard by adding everything – adding lots of research and sporting facilities and great buildings and so forth. That’s not going to be a sustainable strategy going forward. For many of these institutions, online may be a powerful part of what they do. That focus will be really important. When you are going online, what is unique about you?
(via @adfig)
The Culture of Education, Jerome Bruner (1996)
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“Then, while the hard-nosed science professors were decrying the softness of the “soft subjects,” Europe marched off to war once again — acting out the historical-social studies-literary stories that were presumed only to be “enriching the mind.” Surely we could do better at understanding ourselves and our mad lurchings. Poison gas and Big Berthas might be the deadly fruits of verifiable science, but the impulse to use them grew out of those stories we tell ourselves. So should we not try to understand their power better, to see how stories and historical accounts are put together and what there is about them that leads people either to live together or to maim and kill each other?”
[p. 90]
How We Will Read: Clay Shirky
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“What I’m saying is — as I was reading it I was struck by this passage. And that sentiment is freeze-dried. Maybe no one ever defrosts it. Maybe it just sits there as an informative piece of meta-data. Maybe it doesn’t make any difference to anybody. But maybe, the fact that I picked out that passage causes it to surface in someone else’s search. Or I could see everybody that picked out that passage. Or I could do a search where I filter for everyone who cared about that passage and show me the other passages they agreed about to get the commonality of the books they read. The point is, by switching to default public, the aggregate value of that information is so much larger than anybody believed it would be in the 1990s.”
(via @adfig)
The Culture of Education, Jerome Bruner (1996)
Via Scoop.it – More … or less!
“Our Western pedagogical tradition hardly does justice to the importance of intersubjectivity in transmitting culture. Indeed, it often clings to a preference for a degree of explicitness that seems to ignore it. So teaching is fitted into a mold in which a single, presumably omniscient teacher explicitly tells or shows presumably unknowing learners something they presumably know nothing about. Even when we tamper with this model, as with “question periods” and the like, we still remain loyal to its unspoken precepts. I believe that one of the most important gifts that a cultural psychology can give to education is a reformulation of this impoverished conception. For only a very small part of educating takes place on such a one-way street — and it is probably one of the least successful parts.”
[pp. 20-21]
