Stephen Downes

The subject of unbundling of education has been of interest to be over the years, from the Future of Online Learning to the Role of the Educator. This post takes a more structured (or at least, a more square) look at the subject. This redraft of Staton's model takes a more learner-centered approach to the subject. "In the end, people are buying knowledge and the process of acquiring knowledge," he writes. "They are not buying the Content Loop.  The Content Loop is what content providers create to ensure they acquire the knowledge they need."

I once wrote a two-line poem to the effect that I realized how much I love to sort my stuff. This article reminds me of that poem (which is otherwise forgettable). Chris Lott writes, "James Delbourgo’s essay The Triumph of the Strange is a clever and fascinating rumination on the concept and politics of curiosity in history and art." It is all that, but it ends with the growing disparity between the capacity to know and the need to know.

How could you go wrong? "‘The Joy of Logic’ also hails logic’s all-time heroes: George Boole who moved logic beyond philosophy to mathematics; Bertrand Russell, who took 360+ pages but heroically proved that 1 + 1 = 2; Kurt Godel, who brought logic to its knees by demonstrating that some truths are unprovable; and Alan Turing, who, with what Cliff calls an ‘almost exquisite paradox’, was inspired by this huge setback to logic to conceive the computer."

Interesting post on the Structured Observed Learning Outcome (SOLO). "The reason why we are investing quite heavily into SOLO," writes Alice Leung, "is because as teachers, we know that self-regulation and quality feedback are the two of the most effective elements in increasing student achievement." This post outlines mechanisms for describing learning intentions and success criteria and has a sample activity (11 pages, Scribd) and presentation used with students (5 page Scribd). Reflection is good; this is a pretty simple tool but I like the way it approaches the need to be reflective.

So anyhow Jeremiah Owyang announced his new venture "Crowd Companies" at LeWeb in Paris and picked up some tech-business press, which is what LeWeb is all about. These are two very different perspectives. The Wired article (of course) gushes. "Of all the big ideas to emerge out of Silicon Valley in the past decade, none seem to resonate with personal computing’s counterculture roots as much as the so-called sharing economy... As it turns out, however, sharing has also shown itself to have striking profit potential." David Armano focuses on "the collaborative economy" (and not so much sharing). "Individuals who have never met in real life (makers), collaborating over the Web... " to make products at a fraction of what they would have cost otherwise. I think there's value in community production - I gave two talks on the idea today - but I'm less sanguine abpout it being so easily monetized. When community becomes economy, it becomes all about factories, and never parks and schools.

I'm not sure Sun Tzu is the best model to use when discussing innovation in education (I prefer Lao Tse, "The excellence of water appears in its benefiting all things, and in its occupying, without striving, the low place which all men dislike). But it's business writing, so it's all Sturm und Drang, I guess. Anyhow, Len Sherman's point is that the sceptics are wrong to dismiss the Udacity pivot to corporate learning as a failure. "It fails," he writes, "to recognize that Thrun’s pivoted business model poses a far more serious threat to traditional higher education institutions than Udacity’s original approach." Udacity is now focusing on an area long shunned by traditional institutions, he says, and in so doing threatens to undermine one of the key foundations of the universities' business: employability.

I don't agree with all the details but I agree with his overall premise. In particular, I think Udacity's pivot was a failure - if it's going to do corporate learning, it will need new technology as well as a new focus, or it will be mashed by incumbents. And secondly, I think that post-secondary education has been investing in corporate learning, but not in such a way as to challenge the essential dominion of formal learning and credentials. So, with Sherman, I think higher education is prone to disruption. It wouldn't take much to create substantial change in the sector. But contra Sherman, I think it will take significantly more than that Udacity was offering to do the trick. Anyhow, good article, worth a careful read.

Interesting article. A student group wants to set up on campus to explore digital rights and freedoms. Its work will include looking at and explaining things like Tor, a softwrae platform that preserves anonymity in online communications. But: "This is problematic for IT professionals at Iowa State University who are charged with monitoring activity on the university's network." The group would have to promise not to set up Tor nodes or free software which enables anonymity. The group wonders. "The admonition not to discuss or be involved with certain legal, ethical, and important free software projects was, we felt, misguided."

I know that the plural of anecdote is not data, but at some point the sheer number of anecdotes, in comparison to the population size, has to compel some reflection. This article contains 19 anecdotes about small private colleges in trouble. Maybe it's coincidence? Or maybe it's a declining student population base, increasing competitiveness, and the growing popularity of (online) alternatives.