Hack (Higher) Education

Inspired in part by a recent talk by Stephen Downes on "E-Learning Generations" and by the work I'm doing in thinking about how technologies enhance (or not) the way we learn, I've decided to start chronicling some of my own experiences -- two decades ago now -- getting my Bachelor's Degree by piecing together a series of distance learning, face-to-face, and correspondence courses.

Blackboard unveiled a new UI today, something that certainly seems a response to not just user complaints but to the flood of new learning management systems entering the market. But is a UI change sufficient? A look at the Berlin-based iVersity shows a very different approach to thinking about what an online learning platform can be.

It's fairly clear that Silicon Valley has decided that education is a space ripe for "disruption." But there's a lot of talk that "suddenly" technology and education are coming together. This is a grossly a-historical way to think about ed-tech, one that ignores years of research, development, successes and failures.

Plenty of folks see the move to digital textbooks as "inevitable." After all, more and more people are buying e-books and e-readers. Yet college students in particular continue to turn up their noses to digital textbooks. What assumptions are we making that lead us to think that digital textbooks are what students want, let alone need?

Tech bloggers were awake and ready in the wee hours of the morning to "live blog" the highly anticipated Facebook IPO today. While the filing didn't come until later this afternoon, there's still going to be plenty of ink spilled over the numbers that it reveals. What's interesting to me as part of the S-1 filing is a letter from CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg. In it, he speaks of "The Hacker Way" as part of the Facebook culture. When we think about how technology can and will change education, what's to be learned from this sort of philosophy?

Last week, I described the new iTunes U app as a "pseudo-LMS." I've been thinking more about what that means -- about the implications of Apple's decision to re-present its educational content this way and how it contrasts to some of the education startups that are challenging what a LMS should look like.

Yesterday, Stanford University professor Sebastian Thrun announced his resignation and plans instead to focus on his online learning startup Udacity. Thrun taught the wildly popular Artificial Intelligence class last fall, and he now says "I can’t teach at Stanford again." What are the implications on the ongoing disruptions to the universities' (near) monopoly over credentialing? What does it mean when a professor sees his brand as stronger than a university's?

Much of the attention over Apple's education announcements yesterday has focused on digital textbooks. But that was just one of two initiatives the company unveiled. The other was a revamped iTunes U. Here's a hands-on look at what's new in what Apple calls "the world's largest catalog of free educational content."