למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

3 ways the modern school is becoming more like the modern workplace

Schools that want to train the workers of tomorrow are taking heed and giving them the kinds of experiences they need to succeed in these new, less rigidly hierarchical workplaces.

I used to say that thinking algorithmically was pretty important for thinking in general. In my undergraduate classes I often had a graduate student play “robot” and told the students in class to give the robot orders. What happened was always pretty funny because the students (who could not code) never really understood that the “robot” couldn’t interpret what they meant.

coding just enables clear thinking and precise communication.

Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.

“Everyone should learn to code” is the new way of saying we need to create compliant factory workers and that the real purpose of school is to make sure that we are training people for the “factory jobs” of the future.

one has to see what the programmers at these institutions are actually doing. They are monitoring, responding to bug reports, and trying to update legacy code that supports the internal workings of their institutions. In other words, it is rather dull work.

computers can be carriers of powerful ideas and of the seeds of cultural change ... they can help people form new relationships with knowledge that cut across the traditional lines separating humanities from sciences and knowledge of the self from both of these. (עמ' 4)

school will continue to be an awful experience designed by people who really do not care if children are miserable and poorly served.

עכשיו את חורף המריבה שלנו – השמש לבית יורק הפך לקיץ

The way to really bust up the higher education cartel is move to a certification process versus a diploma process because a diploma process maintains that cartel within these institutions of higher education.

We’ve got the internet -- you have so much information available. Why do you have to keep paying different lecturers to teach the same course? You get one solid lecturer and put it up online and have everybody available to that knowledge for a whole lot cheaper? But that doesn’t play very well to tenured professors in the higher education cartel. So again, we need disruptive technology for our higher education system.

would you be better off popping in 14 hours of Ken Burns’s Civil War tape and then have those teachers proctor based on that excellent video production already done?

I'm here to support teachers, not replace them.

I would argue that there never was a viable vision for MOOCs in higher education in the first place. The big three MOOC providers’ trial-and-error efforts to find a viable business model are what led to their shifts in strategy and ultimately the departure of their founders for fields outside of education.

He’s thinking big now. He imagines that in 10 years, job applicants will tout their Udacity degrees. In 50 years, he says, there will be only 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education and Udacity has a shot at being one of them.

For nearly 30 years, pundits have predicted that education technology would disrupt higher education. Online courses will reduce costs and create unprecedented access to higher education, so the argument goes. Likewise, adaptive learning will improve — or replace — the art of teaching as the right digital content is delivered at the right time to each individual learner.

It’s looking increasingly like none of these are the game-changers we expected.

the advent of a new digital language that connects higher education and the labor market and, in so doing, exerts profound changes on both.

The historic disconnect between higher education and the needs of the labor market is a data problem.

will close the gap between higher education and the labor market and usher in a new era in human capital.

It may be that liberal arts courses provide high-value competencies that predict career success across many professions.

LinkedIn is the only organization I know of, public or private, that has the data to study long-term career outcomes of education in a broad and meaningful way. Nobody else comes close. Not even the government. Their data set is enormous, fairly comprehensive, and probably reasonably accurate. Which also means that they are increasingly in a position to recommend colleges, majors, and individual courses and competencies. An acquisition like Lynda.com gives them an ability to sell an add-on service—“People who are in your career track advanced faster when they took a course like this one, which is available to you for only X dollars”—but it also feeds their data set.

The primary value of the acquisition wasn’t content. It was data. It was providing additional, fine-grained nodes on the career graphs of their users.

האוניברסיטאות מנותקות משוק התעסוקה ועד כמה בית הספר לא מכין אותנו ל”עולם שבחוץ”.

דרך הרשת שלינקדאין מציעה, מועסק פוטנציאלי יכול לכוון במדויק למעסיק אצלו הוא רוצה לעבוד. באמצעות לינדה הוא יכול לתפור לעצמו בדיוק את ההכשרה הדרושה לו כדי להתקבל לעבוד.

אין פער בין שלב הלמידה לשלב העבודה.

כניסה של אלטרנטיבה כזו טומנת בחובה איום לבית הספר ולערכים שהוא מייצג, וגם הזדמנות למוסדות האלה להשתנות מן היסוד בכך שיתנו מענה לאתגר הזה.