The world’s first (and last?) national education intranet
This news crept under my radar three weeks ago. That’s to say, I saw the video where the Scottish Education Secretary announced the cancellation of the procurement of the next phase of the national education intranet, but the announcement was couched and contextualised in such a way that he was pulling the plug on the … Continue reading
Managing shared resources and reclaiming the commons with the School of Commoning
The number of new initiatives that are reimagining learning in some way continues to grow. Compared with the US, where initiatives are entrepreneurial in spirit and mass-scale in ambition, those in the UK seem more to be modest, organic and many are growing out of existing institutions (especially universities). I came across the School of … Continue reading
Good to see things hotting up @UnivProject, starting with Universities: Past & Future event in October
Looking forward to this free weekend event in London, and finding out/contributing to how the plans hatched by Dougald Hine (@Dougald) and others are taking shape Clipped from univproject.pbworks.com Welcome to the University Project A whole set of forces are coming together to disrupt higher education as we know it – here in the UK, … Continue reading
Entrepreneurship accelerator threatens to disrupt Higher Ed model – or is it emperor’s new clothes?
It’s difficult to know what to make of the General Assembly ‘accelerator’ that’s at the centre of this post, because there’s so little detail. “So will we open a bunch more campuses? Put all our classes online? Start training executives? We don’t know,” writes cofounder Brad Harvgreaves in a linked article (http://www.businessinsider.com/general-assembly-financing-expands-abroad-2011-9). “Right now we’re … Continue reading
Michael Wesch on the secret sauce of classroom teaching in the Web 2.0 world
Michael Wesch is perhaps best known for his YouTube videos like The Machine is Us/ing Us (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g). But he’s also an innovator in teaching methods in Higher Education. Below is an excerpt of an excerpt where Wesch explains what he thinks is the secret of his success. Click through fror the full article and podcast. … Continue reading
Great short, animated video on why universities have to get more open and agile
http://video.fastcompany.com/plugins/player.swf?v=08388cba12094&p=fc_social By Anya Kamenetz, author of DIY U, source.
Re-imagining the university (again but this time differently)
(I’ve checked with Keith and the absence of a seventh principle between the sixth and the eighth is a simple error!) Clipped from http://www.thesocietyforcuriousthought.com Re-imagining the university (again but this time differently) There’s nothing particularly new about calling for the university to be re-thought/re-imagined/rebuilt. How could it be otherwise? An institution set up in order … Continue reading
Saylor.org: zero-cost alternative to higher education
Another initiative (US-based, non-profit) to provide alternatives to universities, based around Open CourseWare. Saylor covers a good range of course areas, though “while we may try to obtain accreditation in the future, at present, Saylor.org is not an accredited institution and does not confer degrees of any kind”. There’s a good appreciation by Stian Haklev … Continue reading
Are edupunks dismantling the public institutions of higher education?
There’s a fair bit of noise and identity politics in this rant (and response from the writer who feels attacked by it), but also an interesting point about the scope for what I’d call ‘agile’ approaches to reform the institutions rather than undermine them. In a nutshell, Jim Groom, the academic credited with coining the … Continue reading
