The Campus Tsunami - NYTimes.com
This week, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology committed $60 million to offer free online courses from both universities. Two Stanford professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, have formed a company, Coursera, which offers interactive courses in the humanities, social sciences, mathematics and engineering. Their partners include Stanford, Michigan, Penn and Princeton. Many other elite universities, including Yale and Carnegie Mellon, are moving aggressively online. President John Hennessy of Stanford summed up the emerging view in an article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, “There’s a tsunami coming.”
What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web.
(via @mgorbis)
Is The US In A Phase Change To The Creative Economy? - Steve Denning
Denning refers to Stieglitz’s article in Vanity Fair which states that US economy is going through a fundamental shift in the nature of the economy.
Why no recovery? The idea of the bailouts and the stimulus was that these measures would return the economy to where it had been before the crisis.
The striking part of Stiglitz’s argument is to say that this is indeed what has happened. The economy has gotten back to its former state. The problem, says Stiglitz, is that the former state of the economy was much worse than anyone realized. Getting back to where we were means getting back to a state of sickness, not to health.
Denning then argues that Stieglitz is wrong when saying that US is in process of being transformed into a service economy, when it is in fact a creative economy that lies in the future.
In the present situation I think US would benefit most from realizing that it really is a major phase transition and not just some problems in the economical machinery which can be fixed by a quick fix. The question of what kind of economy the industrialized world might be more complicated than what both Stieglitz and Denning is assuming, but I don’t believe it is the key question for any US government at this stage. If they first change mindset from maintenance mode into a transformation mode, then they can discuss the deeper issues where the economy really is heading.
Do you wonder why our economy is in such a mess? Do you wonder why the world you grew up with and thought you knew doesn’t seem to be the world you live in? Do you feel less safe today than you did 10 years ago? Do you wonder why the most powerful nation in the world still feels unsafe? Do you sometimes wonder if the nation will survive and wonder how it will survive? Are you concerned about how much foreign ownership of business there is?
These are all hallmarks of information revolutions. For example, when the printing press was introduced, Spain was the most powerful nation with a cosmopolitan outlook, support for science and exploration and unheard of wealth. Yet as that information revolution worked its way through Europe, it became economically out competed; a political, cultural, and scientific backwater. They were bested by their former colony, Holland (The Spanish Netherlands) and the little no-account island upstart country – England. Trade was almost entirely taken over by foreigners. Their gifted and brilliant finance minister Gonzalez de Cellorigo lamented,
“… there are rich who loll at ease or poor who beg, and we lack people of the middle sort, whom neither wealth nor poverty prevents from pursuing the rightful kind of business enjoined by Natural Law”[i]
