The Chronicle of Higher Education has a great feature on Dr. Henry Jenkins, director of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. Too bad it’s locked down so that most folks can’t access it…
If you haven’t yet read Convergence Culture, you should!
Surprised? Two primarily online universities and one community college among the top five. FYI, the University of Phoenix has more than twice the number of students (117,309) as any of the next four (which range from 54,169 to 50,663).
[Source: Chronicle of Higher Education. Campuses with the Largest Enrollments, Fall 2005. August 31, 2007.]
Is it already July 3? Way back on June 20 I had the pleasure of talking with Chris Craft about online learning for a class he’s taking. The focus was mainly on higher education but much of our conversation was relevant to the K-12 world as well. Chris posted our discussion as a podcast in case you’d like to hear it:
From a colleague’s e-mail autoreply:
I am away for the summer semester and will return Aug 15, 2007. I will not be able to respond to your e-mail until then.
This is a pretty common occurrence in academia. Postsecondary faculty that aren’t teaching during the summer will disappear for a few months and then resurface in the fall. Many leave answering machine messages and/or e-mail autoreplies that they’re gone, completely unavailable (literally) to anyone who might want to reach them. They’re recharging their batteries and taking advantage of the quiet time to work on articles, books, and other projects. It still strikes me as sort of odd, though, to simply disappear like this.
Other than K-12 teachers, I can’t think of any other professions that simply vanish for months at a time. No postal mail + no telephone + no e-mail = no contact.
[photo credit: www.flickr.com/photos/ron_richardson/280329347]
The Brookings
Institution’s Hamilton Project recently released a report titled An Education
Strategy to Promote Opportunity, Prosperity, and Growth. After noting that
approximately $874 billion per year is spent on education in the United States,
the authors highlight the economic and educational benefits of universal
preschool and rethinking our current system of financial aid for higher
education. Here are some interesting quotes from the report…
Preschool
Jens Ludwig of Georgetown University and Isabel Sawhill of The Brookings
Institution propose a program called Success by Ten. This program would give
children from low-income families high-quality, full-time education for the
first five years of life, and then would use proven-effective methods to give
them extra help during their elementary school years. The early childhood
program would be based on the successful Abecedarian Project; it could be
thought of as “Head Start on steroids,” as it would combine, expand, and
transform the Early Head Start and Head Start programs. Ludwig and Sawhill
estimate that, if fully implemented, Success by Ten could increase GDP by up to
0.8 percent, while, on an individual level, bringing the dramatic benefits of
Abecedarian – greater employment and college entry, reduced teen pregnancy and
crime – to millions of American children.
Higher education
Susan Dynarski and Judith Scott-Clayton, both of Harvard University,
argue that the complexity and sluggishness of the federal system for
distributing student financial aid creates serious obstacles to college
attendance by making it enormously difficult for low- and moderate-income
students to assess their eligibility for aid. Indeed, studies have found scant
evidence that the federal program of grants and tax credits actually increases
enrollment, in contrast to the proven effects of much simpler programs such as
the Social Security Student Benefit Program and Georgia’s HOPE program. While
the complexity of the current system is intended to target aid to those who need
it most, Dynarski and Scott-Clayton show that a dramatically simplified aid
process could nearly reproduce the current distribution of aid. Under their
proposal, students could figure out their grant aid eligibility by looking at a
small, simple table that fits easily on a postcard. In fact, the table would be
put on a postcard and distributed through schools and the mail so that aid
information could be simple, certain, and delivered early. Meanwhile, the
application process could be as easy as checking a box on the family’s regular
tax returns. Dynarski and Scott-Clayton estimate that their proposed program
would increase enrollment among the grant-eligible population by between 5.6 and
7.4 percentage points.
The authors also discuss the teacher labor market and K-12 curricular
experimentation, among other things. Even if you’re not interested in
large-scale education policy issues, the report might be worth a quick read
just to familiarize yourself with some of the ways national policymakers think
about K-12 education.
As an untenured professor at a major research university, of necessity I
spend a lot of time thinking and talking about ‘writing’ and ‘publication.’ I’ve
blogged about some of this before. I’m essentially caught between two
worlds: the dynamic, interactive, freewheeling, rough-and-tumble, unmoderated cosmos of Web
2.0 and the slower-moving, calmer, peer-reviewed realm of traditional academic
publishing. It’s often a difficult tension, particularly for those of us who are
using these new communication and collaboration tools but whose tenure decisions
are being made by peers that are not active technology users. Recently several
higher education organizations have explicitly noted the strain and advocated
for some reconsiderations of what it means to write, to publish, and to reach an
audience.
George
Siemens has noted that
The central filtering agent is no longer the teacher or institution. It’s
the learner. Think about what that means to our education system as we know it
today. It changes everything . . . . [A]s educators, we are not grasping (or prepared
for) the depth of the change that is occurring under our feet. If it’s happened
(breaking apart the center) in every other industry – movies, music, software,
business – what makes us think that our educational structures are immune? And
what does it mean to us? What should we be doing now to prepare our
institutions? Ourselves? Our learners?
Information validity is increasingly determined by the views of many individuals, not the select domain of a few [e.g., Amazon book reviews or Digg or Technorati rankings] . . . . [E]xpert-bases systems have value, but their value diminishes simply
because no single person can keep up with today’s information. A
network, however, can.
Of course this has major implications for the academic concept of peer review (which is under fire on some fronts). I wonder when the egg is going to crack in academia. Two years? Five? Ten? And how do we retain our hedgehog concepts of research and scholarship while simultaneously adapting to the realities of a new era?
FYI, I highly recommend the Horizon Report, which
highlights six technologies that will have major impacts on higher education in
the next one to five years.