Last Sunday, Jeffrey Young wrote about the use of the Internet to deliver lectures in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The article centered on the work of Salman Khan, who posts home-made lectures on YouTube:

The lo-fi videos seem to work for students, many of whom have written glowing testimonials or even donated a few bucks via a PayPal link. The free videos have drawn hundreds of thousands of views, making them more popular than the lectures by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, famous for making course materials free, or any other traditional institution online, according to the leaders of YouTube’s education section.

Young…

[...] called up one of the donors, Jason Fried, chief executive of 37signals, a hip business-services company, who recently gave an undisclosed amount to Khan Academy, to find out what the attraction was.

“The next bubble to burst is higher education,” he said. “It’s too expensive for people—there’s no reason why parents should have to save up a hundred grand to send their kids to college. I like that there are alternative ways of thinking about teaching.”

A review of the comments appended to the article suggest that many readers agree that higher education faces serious competition from online knowledge repositories. What the article misses however, is consideration of the conversion of information acquisition/collection to personal knowledge. Schools such as MIT, through their support of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, have demonstrated their understanding that the real value of higher education is not the downloading of knowledge through texts and lectures, but rather through the production of new and personal knowledge that their unique environments offer. This tacit, added values provided by the institutions are what define quality higher education.

European colleges and universities are notorious for having embraced lectures over other course formats (i.e., seminars, laboratories). In these environments, student learning does not occur as much within lecture halls as it occurs outside of the classroom — through interactions with other students, individual and informal study groups, independent or directed research, etc.

In the age of YouTube lectures, universities need not worry about their bubbles bursting, but rather, what they should be doing in the classrooms instead of lecturing.

Dan Wallace (@ideafood) forwarded a link to this short essay by TED curator, Ted Anderson. Networking technologies are transforming the potential of teachers:

There are many scary things about today’s world. But one that is truly thrilling is that the means of spreading both knowledge and inspiration have never been greater. Five years ago, an amazing teacher or professor with the ability to truly catalyze the lives of his or her students could realistically hope to impact maybe 100 people each year. Today that same teacher can have their words spread on video to millions of eager students. There are already numerous examples of powerful talks that have spread virally to massive Internet audiences.

Indeed, the Chinese are figuring this out, and are packaging recordings of instruction by their top teachers in mobile devices. Moreover, free tools like Skype, YouTube and Twitter that operate on inexpensive hardware provide new opportunities not only for connecting teachers with a broader audience of students, but also for connecting students to the world. Likewise, both teachers and students can learn from …and co-create new knowledge with… their peers, globally.

In the comments, Michael Rossney makes another point:

When potential students are selecting a traditional school, or course or teacher the deciding factors are likely to be: Proximity, Cost, Availability of time/course places. These just aren’t such an issue online.

This concept is very real for me: Last week I attended an information evening from a prominent college here in Dublin on a business MBA. I wanted not just to learn strategies but to rub shoulders with result focused businesspeople, social entrepreneurs etc. As I left I couldn’t help thinking that I could get more value studying certain TED speakers or similar if I could just harness that information and use it.

So, there we go. The question isn’t access to technologies, but how we make the most of the technologies and knowledge resources available. Rather than blindly advocating for technological adoption, is it now time to focus on the purposive use of technologies for human capital development?

Tapscott said: “Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge — the internet is. Kids should learn about history but they don’t need to know all the dates.

“It is enough that they know about the Battle of Hastings, without having to memorise that it was in 1066. 

They can look that up and position it in history with a click on Google. Memorising facts and figures is a waste of time.”

Absolutely! “Download”/banking style pedagogies are made obsolete by Google and Wikipedia.

In our Leapfrog series, we have argued that education should concentrate on “upload” pedagogies, based on knowledge production by students and collaborating faculty, together with augmentations provided by a new category of community-based volunteers. Using the most advanced forms of information search engines, networks, early artificial intelligence, and the aforementioned volunteers, there is an opportunity to leapfrog education beyond any of the competition. This will require fundamental changes in the mission, structure, and curricula of education at all levels.

Time to drop memorization and refocus education on the liberal skills?

Got development ideas for the digital world? The OECD is willing to engage in a dialog by video. The organization’s press release says it all:

OECD – Paris, 29 May 2008

OECD and YouTube launch “Future of the Internet” initiative

“How can the Internet make the world a better place?” This is the question OECD is asking the public on YouTube, the leading online video community, at www.youtube.com/futureinternet.

YouTube users can share their opinion with the leaders and opinion shapers attending the OECD Ministerial meeting on the “Future of the Internet” in Seoul, Korea on 17-18 June 2008.

“You tell the leaders and opinion shapers in Seoul what you think and they will upload responses to your ideas. Join in. Take part in making a difference,” said OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría.

The best videos uploaded to www.youtube.com/futureinternet will be shown to ministers and VIPs at the event. They will be invited to react and their answers will be uploaded on YouTube during the meeting.

In Seoul, all participants, including government ministers from more than 40 countries and hundreds of global leaders from international government organisations, business, the Internet’s technical community and civil society, will be encouraged to submit their own answers at a dedicated YouTube booth on site.

For full details of how to participate, see www.youtube.com/futureinternet

Thanks to Dr. Cristóbal Cobo for the tip.

The Mini-Note will compete primarily with Intel’s Classmate PCs — which are designed by Intel and feature Intel chips but are built and branded by other companies — and Asustek’s Eee PC.

To a lesser extent, they also will go up against the XO laptop from the Cambridge, Mass., nonprofit One Laptop per Child, which is intended primarily for schoolchildren in developing countries.

Meanwhile, Nokia quietly announced the WiMAX edition of the N810 Internet Tablet. As noted here previously, it’s predecessor, the N800, has potential as an m-learning device. The N810 is based on the same hardware and software architecture, but incorporates a keyboard and can connect to both Wi-Fi and WiMAX networks. Can the expanded networking capabilities of the Linux-powered N810 WiMAX fill the low-cost (but highly connected) computing gap in U.S. education?

If a customer chooses not to register the domain name with Network Solution (sic) they are forced to wait 4 days for Network Solutions to delete the domain name in the Free Add Grace period. After the four day hostage period the consumer is free from the hostage situation and can register the domain somewhere else. However Network Solutions has now exposed those domains to Domain Tasters that will snipe those domain up milliseconds after Network Solutions deletes them. By registering the domain Network Solutions is exposing the domain in the DNS and every computer in the world now knows about the domain. These domains are now easy fodder for scammers and it is mind blowing that Network Solutions would expose their customers queries to the world in this manner.

Wicked.

The N800 is a WiFi device with an 800×480 (!) touchscreen strapped on, and can support up to 16GB of SD flash memory. It runs a light/mobile flavor of Debian GNU/Linux. This means that developers can readily tap into a large library of open source tools. The user interface could use some help. As Sean Luke points out, my old Newton is still superior in many areas.

The N800 has some great things going for it.  I particularly enjoy:

• The huge screen on a small device, allowing me to view Web pages as they’re intended to be viewed
• WordPy, a competent offline WordPress editor (one wish: it needs a means to upload/incorporate images from the N800)
• The option of using a Gecko/Mozilla or a Opera-based browser
• The community-supported Claws mail
• Skype!
• Having a mobile device with an option to use a proper command line interface!

The N800 is not marketed to be used as a m-learning device, but I cannot help myself from comparing it to the Ozing and Noah m-learning devices reviewed last May. Where the Chinese devices fell short on application quality and developer accessibility (at least the Noah NP890+ runs a Linux variant), the N800 has an active, open source development community. Perhaps the Chinese companies will learn from Nokia and open their software to more developers and platforms? Or, perhaps others will leapfrog the Chinese to exploit the m-learning potential of the N800…

Early in January, Stevens introduced Senate bill 49, which among other things, would require that any school or library that gets federal Internet subsidies would have to block access to interactive Web sites, including social networking sites, and possibly blogs as well. It appears that the definition of those sites is so vague that it could include sites such as Wikipedia, according to commentators.

Remember, this is from the senator, who, on the floor, said:

Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially. [...] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material It seems to me that communications and new media literacy needs to be taught in the halls of Congress as well as in our schools.

It seems the senator is concerned all the knowledge distributed through Wikipedia would dangerously tangle the tubes of the Internet. What do you think?

1. The browser-based application
2. Firefox
3. Wikipedia‘s news reporting
4. The $100 laptop
5. Podcasting
6. A renewed debate on what students are doing on the Internet
7. OpenOffice.org 2.0
8. Web 2.0
9. Moodle
10. Blackboard’s takeover of WebCT

Read the original article.