The traditional setup of school classrooms—straight rows of desks with accompanying chairs—doesn’t do much to foster creativity or collaboration. Many experts have proposed redesigning classroom furniture, but a Swedish school system wants to take things a step further. Vittra, which operates 30 schools in Sweden, is seeking to ensure learning takes place everywhere on campus by eliminating classrooms altogether.
How innovative this might seem, it is still the school model. I think learning must be rethought much deeper than changing the parameters within the school model.
Source: GOOD
Not Quite an MIT Degree, but MITx May Still Appeal?
Not a full-fledged diploma — that’s still a possibility only for the 10,000 or so students admitted to its Cambridge, Mass., campus. But on Monday, MIT is announcing that for the first time it will offer credentials — under the name “MITx” — to students who complete the online version of certain courses, starting with a pilot program this spring.
Interesting that a model like the TED model is inspiring universities. Could it also spread to companies in e g the health care industry so that everybody could learn some medical and health knowledge based on recent research by following a series of inspiring and insightful lectures as well??
Technology Cannot Disrupt Education From The Top Down
Computer technology has penetrated the classroom for thirty years with little impact. After hundreds of “disruptive” education startups, the best innovation in education is still the chalkboard. This isn’t the fault of the entrepreneurs, but the fault of an education system which resists innovation at every turn. […]
Anyone who has ever run their own business should immediately see the problem. Principals have little control over the resources in their school. Everything from teachers to textbooks is rationed by a central office commissar – sometimes approval requires the rubber stamp of several bureaucrats (up to seven in Clark County). The central control of public schools is an essential ingredient to prevent disruption—it allows the establishment to build alliances by co-opting players from the teacher union to the for-profit corporation.
This is true for schools as well as for hospitals and car factories. That is why the top-down systems don’t have the capacity to change and need to really break down before any of the necessary processes of change will have any effect.
Are Colleges or Businesses Responsible for Fixing the Employment Skills Gap?
With an 8.6 percent unemployment rate and 3.4 million job openings, there’s a clear mismatch between the kinds of jobs available and the skills job-seekers actually have. But who is responsible for bridging the gap for college graduates: schools or employers?
It turns out that businesses are divided over whether college should be about practical skills for specific industries or broader ones, like critical thinking and writing. According to a new survey commissioned by the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, which polled more than 1,000 employers, 45 percent of hiring managers “believe that most students would be better served by an education that specifically prepares them for the workplace.” Meanwhile, 54 percent of hiring managers say that finding applicants “with the necessary skill and knowledge set is difficult.”
Indeed, considering the strong job growth projected in science, technology, engineering, and math fields over the next decade, too few students are majoring in those subjects. To fix this imbalance, some business leaders and politicians believe that liberal arts majors should go the way of the dinosaur. They advocate making higher education a practical, trade school-like experience that would funnel students into specific majors and spit out graduates ready for the workforce.
» via GOOD
This is a valid question, but it might be that the industrial era separation between education and business are becoming increasingly impossible…?
Source: infoneer-pulse
Could Apprenticeships Replace College Degrees?
With college costs skyrocketing and the number of jobs for new grads on the decline, it’s no wonder that students are questioning whether a degree is worth the investment. But given that the jobs of the future are projected to require some form of post-secondary education, a key question is how to provide academic knowledge and industry-specific training that will prepare students for the future. The answer might come from a throwback to the Middle Ages: apprenticeships.
» via GOOD via infoneer-pulse:
I have been arguing that apprenticeships will emerge again for a number of different reasons than the increasing price of college education:
- today’s job tasks are increasingly more reliant on context specific knowledge, non academic skills, personal capabilities and practical working skills (project leadership, time management…) than what we usually want to acknowledge - what we learn in college is usually the generic part, but when that generic part is decreasing in importance so is the value of going to college
- colleges and universities are not very good at looking outside their faculty to ensure that they are relevant for the rest of the society for the simple reason that they often think they are in the center of the universe - a stance that today’s conscious students recognize and despise, and which is on it’s way to render much of the knowledge that is taught as well as the methods for organizing and teaching irrelevant
- the urge to increase the number of college graduates continues deteriorate the quality of the education
- because of the success of the higher educational model during the last century colleges and universities have developed into centralized and administratively heavy mass manufacturing plants – and when the society needs other models for learning, entrepreneurial speed is usually much faster than speed of the incumbent’s
An apprentice model is surely one of many approaches that we will see challenge the traditional college model.
(via emergentfutures)
Source: infoneer-pulse
Autodesk bringing 3D modeling to the masses | CNET News
You may not know CAD, but if you’ve got a computer, you can now start creating 3D models.
That’s the idea behind 123D Catch and 123D Make, two new free software applications that Autodesk is planning on releasing on Monday. The two programs join the company’s existing iPad app, 123D Sculpt, as part of a family of tools that are intended to give just about anyone the ability not just to make their own 3D designs, but also to get them produced as real, physical models.
Autodesk unveiled the two new applications at a press event at its innovation center here today, making the argument that just about anyone can now play the role of 3D modeler that has traditionally belonged to CAD experts and other professional designers.
With 123D Catch, a user can take any digital camera and use it to photograph a real-world object. By snapping a few dozen pictures from angles all around the object and then uploading them to Autodesk’s cloud-based system via the software, the user can within minutes get back a 3D model of the object. Autodesk will process the model at no charge.
This is of course feeding into he the 3D printing development as well.
Source: CNET
Major Publishers Join Indiana U. Project That Requires Students to Use E-Textbooks
A game-changing e-textbook project at Indiana University—in which the university requires certain students to purchase e-textbooks and negotiates unusually low prices by promising publishers large numbers of sales—now has the participation of major textbook publishers, and university officials plan to expand the effort.
Today McGraw-Hill Higher Education announced that it has agreed to join the project, which has been in a pilot stage for more than a year. A handful of other publishers—John Wiley & Sons; Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishing Group; W.W. Norton; and Flat World Knowledge—have signed on to the effort as well.
Here’s how it works: Students in a select group of courses are required to pay a materials fee, which gets them access to the assigned electronic textbooks or other readings for the course. The university essentially becomes the broker of the textbook sales, and because it is buying in bulk and guaranteeing a high volume, officials say they can score better prices than can the campus bookstore or other retailers.
» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)
Hmm… so the publishers are using the university organization to blackmail students with a 20% decreased price in order to get them used to e-books and at the same time becoming dependent on the publisher as a provider of e-books?
What Indiana U should see here is that they are in the longer run supporting the publisher’s agenda of permanenting themselves in the educational system, a system which have all the possibilities in the world of transforming education away from traditional dependencies which is just draining and slowing down the knowledge spreading and learning process.
Source: infoneer-pulse
Degrees of Debt — Utne Reader
A revealing article about the soon-to-burst educational bubble.
The Project on Student Debt estimates that the average college senior in 2009 graduated with $24,000 in outstanding loans. In August 2010, student loans surpassed credit cards as the nation’s single largest source of debt, edging ever closer to $1 trillion. Yet for all the moralizing about American consumer debt by both political parties, no one dares call higher education a bad investment. The nearly axiomatic good of a university degree in American society has allowed a higher education bubble to expand to the point of bursting.
Stanford’s latest global virtual classroom may have more than 100,000 students | SmartPlanet
This is a really interesting experiment in remote and free education on a scale we haven’t seen before. If your are interested in AI, why not taking the class yourself?
If something really is changing the mindset on what academic educations can be in the future it is initiatives and experiments like this.
Stanford University has launched a new experiment in distributed education, offering a 101-level technology course free and online to to students worldwide this fall. The course, “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence,” will be taught by two leading thinkers in the AI field, Sebastian Thrun, a professor at Stanford, and Peter Norvig, director of research at Google.
At the time of this post, more than 130,000 people signed up fro the online course, scheduled to start on October 10th and last until December 16th. Of course, it’s unknown how many will follow through and register and attend. Details on the course, including a syllabus is available here. The curriculum draws from the same materials, assignments, and exams used in Stanford’s introductory Artificial Intelligence course.
'Flexitime' school that rewrites the book on teaching - Education News, Education - The Independent
Welcome to the world of flexitime schooling which will see a child in Spain educated through Skype from the UK and a mother who splits her son’s education between home teaching and school. Hollinsclough Church of England primary school in Staffordshire is the first in the UK to introduce a part-time policy for pupils.
[…]
Now she has 11 full-time pupils, 10 part-timers and as many as 15 to 20 families coming in to join the school’s learning “hub” – which arranges events such as simulations of archaeological digs and arts activities for children.
The school’s motto is to provide what the parents want for their children, said Mrs Mountford-Lees. “I recently asked them what they would most like and some of them said for their children to learn Latin.” She is now trying to arrange for a private tutor to come in and provide the classes.
(via @per_infontology)
This is a really interesting concept which starts to break down some of the traditional views of what a school is.
To me the important part is that this model was made possible by slack in the system. One key part was a school and a teacher with too few pupils, the other key part was home schooled children who searched for a part time teachers with a certain skill or knowledge.
In the civilized world schools and school systems are almost always so optimized and efficient (read “stuffed”) that there are neither time nor space to be innovative. If innovation needs something it is white space to innovate in, and that is true in the educational system as well.
