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Saved by 17 people (-1 private), first by anonymouse user on 2009-05-13


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Dissagregation - David Wiley broke education into these components, 1) content provisioning, 2) research - conducted, archived, and disseminated, 3) help provided to a student with a question on the content, 4) a social life, and 5) issuing credentials.

Highlighted by jaredstein

There was broad consensus that the internet is enabling substantial changes in the way we learn and teach. It has always been possible to learn outside of a school setting. The ubiquitous connectivity and very low cost of content production and distribution seems to enable the unbundling of key components of education.

Highlighted by joel

Students in the future will be as likely to be evaluated on their portfolio of work, as they are on their grades.

Highlighted by pjhiggins

on 2009-08-12 by pjhiggins

This statement really resonates with me. Not "what does the paper say you have done" but rather, what have you really done? This fits much better with the way I believe we can educate our students for new paradigms.

This is not as crazy as it sounds. Knowledge is, as the economists say, a non-rival good. If I eat an apple, you cannot also eat that same apple; but if I learn something, there is no reason you cannot also learn that thing. Information goods lend themselves to being created, distributed and consumed on the web. It is not so different from music, or classified advertising, or news.

Highlighted by joel

If I eat an apple, you cannot also eat that same apple; but if I learn something, there is no reason you cannot also learn that thing. Information goods lend themselves to being created, distributed and consumed on the web. It is not so different from music, or classified advertising, or news

Highlighted by pjhiggins

on 2009-08-12 by pjhiggins

If we think about this idea here, it becomes philosophically ideal, but how do you put that into place? There are too many politicians and corporations (that's actually one and the same) in the game that would not go in for that. Oh, and the unions? How would they opt in?

dana boyd reminded us that "technology does not determine practice"

danah boyd.jpg

Just shoving broadband into a group of kids, just giving them an iPhone, we can think of a gazillion designs that are valuable ... but, if you don't have a culture embedded in it, [it] becomes just another toy you can text your friends with... I've become so infinitely frustrated with... "let's just dump a bunch of laptops into a population and see what they do with it"... That doesn't work... We've watched students rip out the batteries and use them for everything else under the sun.... I don't think we can just think about the technology.... We have to think about it in a broader system.

Highlighted by finleyt

But the most important thing about that was, I learned how to be obsessed with things... I got obsessed with these things and I had a series of stages in my life where I got obsesses with something else. And I just immersed myself to learn as much as I could. And it's that mechanism I used again and again and again in my professional life. So how do you teach kids to be obsessed with things?

Highlighted by pjhiggins

on 2009-08-12 by pjhiggins

This is a huge question/statement. How do you get kids to get fired up about something? We struggle with student motivation in the traditional mode of education, do you think we would still struggle with it in the model that danah boyd suggests? Or that Johnson was raised in? I don't know if Johnson had a family life that enabled him to dive into baseball from the mathematical side, but chances are he did. What of those that don't have the social structure in place to do that?

Fred is suggesting that the education industry may soon face the same challenges that currently confront the music industry and the newspaper industry. Like those industries, education can be peer produced, delivered as bits, and curated by a community. Like the music and newspaper industries, the cost structures embedded in the education industry's current business models may be very difficult to support in the face of competition from hyper-efficient, web native businesses.

Highlighted by joel

If the transition from the current high touch, but high cost, learning environment to an efficient peer produced learning network is as abrupt and brutal as the transition we are witnessing in the music and newspaper industry, the social consequences are likely to be a lot more severe.

Highlighted by jaredstein

The day was characterized by this conflict between the technologists and entrepreneurs who were driven by the conviction that we can use what Tim O'Reilly calls the "magic powers" of the web to drive down the cost of learning and increase access to knowledge. This optimistic view was tempered by the concern that education is not music and that the existing structure of education delivers a lot more that knowledge. If the transition from the current high touch, but high cost, learning environment to an efficient peer produced learning network is as abrupt and brutal as the transition we are witnessing in the music and newspaper industry, the social consequences are likely to be a lot more severe.

Highlighted by joel

The challenge for all of us it to find ways to exploit technology to reduce the cost and increase the accessibility of education; build political support for the structural changes needed to make this a reality in public schools and architect a transition from the current industrial model of education to a network based model while minimizing social dislocation.

Highlighted by jaredstein

The challenge for all of us it to find ways to exploit technology to reduce the cost and increase the accessibility of education; build political support for the structural changes needed to make this a reality in public schools and architect a transition from the current industrial model of education to a network based model while minimizing social dislocation.

Highlighted by acwagner