I think part of what attracted me to Old Spice campaign was its frivolity. It appeared that they weren’t doing any “serious business”, just having some fun and hopefully selling their product.

So yeah, sure, if you think that’s distance ed, then I can understand your point of view. And one of the problems is that right now, universities are mainly evaluated and ranked based on research… Or even exclusivity, how many applicants can we reject. So even though I might have had a much better experience with Athabasca, or Open University UK (or even Phoenix U to be honest), that credit from UofT obviously looks much better on a transcript!

And that ginandtacos quote, ha! I think he doesn’t really have any knowledge of the sort of online classes of our best experiences. I didn’t pick on his characterization, though I certainly could have pointed to my own experience in the Mozilla/ccLearn Open Education class with Philipp Schmidt as one where I learned so much that it immediately reorganized some of my deepest interests and dreams. I recognized that many of the online classes offered at my former university might have fit ginandtacos’ remark though: those that students take just for easy credit, knowing they can do the bare minimum almost entirely at the end and get the grade, so that they can pay attention to the other things on their plate. They mechanically leave their 3 comments a week on Blackboard and go back to their regularly scheduled programming. This kind of reform costs less, but it gives online learning a bad name. Just pushing existing classes online for cost reasons (and maybe increased “distance” education access) isn’t the reform that we want, and I wish Anya spent more time making the distinction. Because we know what it feels like to really learn.

Good overview over DIY U. It seems to be a book that really get’s some people riled up. I agree with many of the criticisms, although I still found it to be a very helpful book, especially for many who have no idea any of this even exists.

The Ginandtacos quote is quite ridiculous (“No one who has taken or taught one can claim in earnest to have learned more than they do in traditional courses. Few could honestly claim that they learned anything at all. …”)… Well, in fact Sir, I actually learnt more in my 15 week intro to open ed with David Wiley, than I learnt in almost all my undergrad classes at Uni of Toronto, the most “prestigious” university in Canada! And that was even an open ed class.

I also recognize many of your experiences from undergrad (and sometimes from grad school too in fact, here we have more time to discuss, we spend more time preparing, there are smaller classes, etc – but unless the instructor is good, sometimes we just seem to be throwing out a bunch of quick observation, and then moving on to the next thing. One of the best classes I have ever taken was with Marlene Scardamalia, using the Knowledge Building model I talk about in my presentation, which impressed me a lot).

And yes – absolutely agree about all the stuff we generate during undergrad, that is just filed away and not available or useful to anyone… Such a waste! (Yet many people are really reluctant to open stuff up – even in grad school now, especially teacher candidates… They don’t want a future employer to google them, and see their first fledgling ideas about teaching).

And BTW: Surprised and happy to see a reference to my own presentation in your blog post, which I posted online little more than 24 hours ago! In a way, that proves your point about informal learning networks, compared to traditional methods. If I had handed it in for a class, I’d have gotten a few sentences back after three weeks. Now I got feedback from several professors and professionals, within hours. (But as I said in the talk, that’s also because I’ve been cultivating my network for several years – it’s not necessarily easy to get there for beginners, and it’s something we have to be cognizant of!)

Stian

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/12/insurers-mount-attack-aga_n_317159.html

Ted,

Many the things blogs do best are not what newsrooms do best. Many of the best blogs exist in the layer of commentary above the “hard news” layer (which, is actually one level removed from the primary sources of direct quotes, reports, and other documents). In this structure, stories link to documents on lower levels as a means to build descriptive structures and arguments. Hard news is the basis for the conversation around the water-cooler, but it isn’t actually the conversation. Now the Internet allows people who are experts on specific topics to talk to their peers in their field. The layer up is where the meat of the conversation happens, and newspapers are rapidly losing their grip on that sector of the “societal news conversation”. They try with opinion pages, and the commentary that appears in the columns is indeed an important leg of the overall conversation, but they can only publish once a day. They’re slow and losing eyes to the blogs that can move at 20 quick posts a day (See The Daily Dish). If newspapers want to survive, they need to enter the conversation, not cut themselves off from it by curtailing free speech.

Distributed expertise is the blogging model. The Internet gives you access to a field of experts so broad and deep, it is unmatchable by any media organization in history. (The problem is, so few of them can dedicate a meaningful number of hours a week to the project.) The blogging model is different from the newspaper model, but that doesn’t make it less valuable. Both are essential. And in order to have the best coverage at all levels (which you have argued is essential to society), this linking process should be

Newspapers will not succeed in Shultz/Marburger plan to squeeze cash out of whatever “aggregators” couldn’t mount a successful fair use defense. These cases would get expensive for newspapers real quick. No law is going to pass that won’t allow claims to be challenged, and those just cost money for everybody (enriching lawyers at the expense of the “news conversation,” isn’t it?)

An aside with some personal statistics: My Google (blog) Reader has over 350 subscriptions to sources for posts or articles that are relevant to my interests. Many of them are quite specific and knowledgeable. About 15 are for articles that also appear in print. My town has 2 newspapers, and about 10-20% of what appears in them is relevant to me.