This article takes us from the idea of the MOOC as " making high-quality lectures and course materials widely available" to an image of the university as a monastery. I think Josh Brake gets some things right along the way - criticizing xMOOC model (our MOOCs were never like this, of course) and pointing to the difference, raised by 'work-related' and 'control-related' technologies (which reminds me of my own distinction between free learning and control learning). And this is right: "we should think primarily not about how our students should directly use a given technology, but how that technology can be used to coordinate and facilitate the set of things that they are doing." But I think he he takes a wrong turn when says "what we want our students to do in our classes is not primarily to build a set of skills, but a certain set of character traits that enables them to push themselves to grow." Maybe I'm just misreading what he means by 'character traits' (but the monastic turn is not reassuring).
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